Last week, three members of the OnSIP engineering team attended ClueCon 2016 in Chicago for three days of coder games, round table panels, and informative sessions on real-time communications. As proponents of open source technology, we've been attending ClueCon for many years.
ClueCon is "a conference for developers, by developers." For over 10 years, it has been bringing together people who are interested in VoIP, telephony, and real-time communications. This year's event included sessions by FreeSWITCH, OpenSIPS, and other members of the open source community.
Detecting Abnormal VoIP Traffic with Eric Tamme
On Tuesday, OnSIP Principal Engineer Eric Tamme gave a presentation on different applications of statistical analysis to detect abnormalities in VoIP traffic.
"The novelty of this system is that it's more than just a fraud detection system looking at cost thresholds," says Eric. "The underlying statistical analysis can be applied to any data set - frequency of calls, price of a call, or a combination of data points. This flexibility makes this system useful for detecting many different types of activity, like SPIT (spam over IT) or flooding attacks."
Eric noted that the day before the presentation, our system caught a case of fraud, and we were able to shut down the account before it accrued thousands of dollars worth of phone calls. This timely example demonstrated the ability of the system to catch fraud early before serious damage was done.
The presentation was followed by a lively Q&A session. By open sourcing many parts of his solution, Eric was able to share his methods and insights with other developers on monitoring abnormal VoIP traffic patterns.
WebRTC, SIP.js, and More
On Monday, Dylan gave a short presentation on SIP.js as part of the ClueCon coder games, and we were happy to see other developers promote the library throughout the event. Peter Kelly, an OpenSIPS community member, gave a presentation on how to make calls from the browser to the PSTN using SIP.js.The conference also featured a roundtable on WebRTC, with panelists from Microsoft Edge, Mozilla, FreeSWITCH, and ORTC.
"The interoperability between all the different components is really changing the conversation on real-time communications," notes James Criscuolo, OnSIP Lead Engineer. "Not only is it so much easier to do things like access a microphone or camera from your browser, but the speed at which you're able to exchange information is also accelerating."
Other interesting sessions at ClueCon included a talk on adaptive video routing by Emil Ivov, one of the creators of Jitsi, and a presentation on Matrix, an open standard project for decentralized real-time communications. The OnSIP team also spent time with our friends at the OpenSIPS project, who come from Europe every year to attend ClueCon and meet with other open source developers.
ClueCon was a great opportunity for us to maintain relationships and build new ones with people working on open source software in our industry. We're excited to see what new developments are in the works, and we look forward to coming back next year!