Predicting disaster and providing an “I told you so” when that disaster arrives won’t gain you appreciation, but securing appropriate precautionary methods to prevent disaster will. VoIP security risks are probably no greater than any other Internet security threats. Has proper preparation gone into hardening the VoIP network? This panel looks at what should be considered by telecom managers and network security personnel when securing their networks.
What lessons can be learned from e-mail security risks?
Does deep packet inspection enhance security analysis?
Does hardening a network make it harder for VoIP to work?

Akif Arsoy is Product Manager -- VoIP, in VeriSign's Next-Generation Services group. His background is in SS7 enabled networks, solutions that interconnect the circuit switched and packet switched networks and in SIP-enabled features in next generation networks.

Prior to joining VeriSign, Akif was the engineering director at sentitO Networks responsible for a SIP proxy server and SIP interoperability between sentitO's line access gateway and 3rd party feature server products. His earlier experience was with SS8 Networks and ADC Telecommunications in areas of call control and call routing in SIP and SS7 networks.

Martyn Davies is Principal Consultant at Dialogic, working with a range of technologies from VoIP and NGN through to TDM and traditional SS7 signalling. Starting in the 1980s with a datacommunications focus, his career has embraced software development, technical consultancy and product management during the evolution of IP networking. Today, Martyn is a strong advocate for VoIP technologies and the additional messaging and presence capabilities that come with them.

Martyn represents Dialogic as a member of the Technical Advisory Board at the VoIP Security Alliance (VOIPSA). He is a frequent writer, in print and online, on a variety of telephony topics including VoIP, wireless, and IMS.

Dr. Cullen Jennings is a Distinguished Engineer in the Voice Technology Group at Cisco. Cullen came to Cisco from Vovida Networks which developed an open-source toolkit for Voice-over-IP. He is also an author of O'Reilly's title "Practical VoIP" and the co-chair of the IETF IPTEL Working Group. Currently Cullen is focusing on conferencing, security, and firewall and NAT traversal. Still active in the SIP and open source communities,
Cullen recently contributed a prototype Instant Messaging and Presence client which integrates strong end-to-end security.

Ari Takanen, founder and CTO of Codenomicon, has since 1998 been
focusing his work on information security issues in next-generation
networks and security critical environments. His work at Codenomicon and at the OUSPG research group from University of Oulu aims at ensuring that new technologies are accepted by the general public, by providing means of measuring and ensuring quality in networked software. Ari Takanen is one of the people behind the PROTOS research
that studied information security and reliability errors in e.g. WAP, SNMP, LDAP, VoIP implementations. Ari has written several papers on security, and has been speaking at numerous security and testing conferences, and also at leading universities and international corporations.