Obfuscation of lawfully authorized electonric surveillance
AssigneeCable Television Laboratories, Inc.
InventorsDavid Hancock, Sumanth Channabasappa
Life of this patent
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Abstract
The obfuscation of information included in Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) invites for the purposes of facilitating Lawfully Authorized Electronic Surveillance (LAES) is contemplated. The obfuscation may include the use of LAES headers with invites of sessions that require surveillance as well as those not requiring surveillance and/or selecting values or otherwise influencing parameter selection of data included in LAES headers according to a validity function, a shared secret, a key or other construct.
Claims20
A method for obscuring use of a Lawfully Authorized Electronic Surveillance (LAES) header included within Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) messaging used to support a session associated with packet-based voice and/or real-time multimedia applications, the method comprising:
- determining a validity function to be used in processing a field included in the LAES header for the purposes of assessing whether the session is to be placed under surveillance, the validity function generating a first result if the session is to be placed under surveillance and a second result if the session is not to be placed under surveillance;
- and
- selecting a first value for the field being processed with the validity function so as to cause the validity function to generate the first result if surveillance is desired and to generate the second result if surveillance is not desired, thereby obfuscating whether the session is to be placed under surveillance.
A method for obscuring use of a Lawfully Authorized Electronic Surveillance (LAES) headers included within Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) invites, the method comprising:
- determining a first plurality of SIP invites associated with SIP sessions requiring surveillance;
- determining a second plurality of SIP invites associated with SIP sessions not requiring surveillance;
- and
- including LAES headers within each of the first and second plurality of SIP invites, including determining values for one or more fields included within the LAES headers of the first plurality of SIP invites such that when processed with a validity function the associated SIP session is determined to require surveillance and determining values for one or more fields included within the LAES headers of the second plurality of SIP invites such that when processed with the validity function the associated SIP sessions are determined to not require surveillance.
A non-transitory computer-readable medium having a plurality of instructions operable with a processor of a call management server (CMS) or a call session control function (CSCF) to facilitate surveilling session initiation protocol (SIP) sessions, the instructions being sufficient for:
- determining a first Lawfully Authorized Electronic Surveillance (LAES) header included within a first SIP invite associated with a first SIP session;
- processing at least a first portion of the first LAES header with a validity function to produce a first result;
- and
- determining surveillance of the first SIP session to be required if the first result is of a first type and determining surveillance of the first SIP session to be unnecessary if the first result is of a second type.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.