As soon as you have packets arriving on your sip:provider CE server, it will require a bit of time of your CPU. Denial of Service attacks are aimed to break down your system by sending floods of SIP messages in a very short period of time and keep your system busy to handle such huge amount of requests. sip:provider CE allow you to block such kind of attack quite easily, by configuring the following section in your /etc/ngcp-config/config.yml:

security:
   dos_ban_enable: 'yes'
   dos_ban_time: 3600
   dos_reqs_density_per_unit: 50
   dos_sampling_time_unit: 2

Basically, as soon as sip:provider CE receives more than 50 messages from the same IP in a time window of 2 seconds, that IP will be block for 3600 sec, and you will see in the the kamailio-lb.log a line saying:

Nov 9 00:11:53 sp1 lb[41958]: WARNING: <script>: IP '1.2.3.4' is blocked and banned - R=<null> ID=304153-3624477113-19168@tedadg.testlab.local

The banned IP will be stored in kamailio memory, you can check the list via web interface or via the following command:

# ngcp-kamctl lb fifo sht_dump ipban

This is a very common attack you can easily detect checking your /var/log/ngcp/kamailio-proxy.log. You will see INVITE/REGISTER messages coming in with strange usernames. Attackers is trying to spoof/guess subscriber’s credentials, which allow them to call out. The very first protection against these attacks is: ALWAYS USE STRONG PASSWORD. Nevertheless sip:provider CE allow you to detect and block such attacks quite easily, by configuring the following /etc/ngcp-config/config.yml section:

  failed_auth_attempts: 3
  failed_auth_ban_enable: 'yes'
  failed_auth_ban_time: 3600

You may increase the number of failed attempt if you want (in same cases it’s better to be safed, some users can be banned accidentally because they are not writing the right password) and adjust the ban time. If a user try to authenticate an INVITE (or REGISTER) for example and it fails more then 3 times, the "user@domain" (not the IP as for Denial of Service attack) will be block for 3600 seconds. In this case you will see in your /var/log/ngcp/kamailio-lb.log the following lines:

Nov 9 13:31:56 sp1 lb[41952]: WARNING: <script>: Consecutive Authentication Failure for 'sipvicous@mydomain.com' UA='sipvicous-client' IP='1.2.3.4' - R=<null> ID=313793-3624525116-589163@testlab.local

Both the banned IPs and banned users are shown in the Admin web interface, you can check them by accessing the Security Bans section in the main menu. You can check the banned user as well by retrieving the same info directly from kamailio memory, using the following commands:

# ngcp-kamctl lb fifo sht_dump auth

For any service provider it is important to maintain a reliable backup policy as it enables prompt services restoration after any force majeure event. Hence, we strongly suggest you to configure a backup procedure. The sip:provider CE has a built-in solution that can help you back up the most crucial data. Alternatively, it can be integrated with any Debian compatible backup software.

16.6.1.2. The built-in backup solution

The sip:provider CE comes with an easy-to-use solution that creates everyday backups of the most important data:

• The system configuration files. The whole /etc directory is backed up.
• Exported CDRs. The /home/jail/home/cdrexport directory with csv files.
• All required databases on corresponding servers.

This functionality is disabled by default and can be enabled and configured in the backuptools subsection in the config.yml file. Please, refer to the “C.1.3 backup tools” section of the “NGCP configs overview” chapter for the backup configuration options.

Once you set the required configuration options, apply the changes:

ngcpcfg apply 'enabled the backup feature'

Once you activate the feature, the sip:provider CE will create backups in the off-peak time and put them to the /var/backup/ngcp_backup directory. You can copy these files to your backup server using scp or ftp.

	make sure that you have enough free disk space to store the backups for the specified number of days.

In the worst case scenario, when the system needs to be recovered from a total loss, you only need 4 steps to get the services back online:

ngcpcfg apply 'restored the system from the backup'

The easiest way to fetch information about a single call among the log files is the search for the SIP CallID (a unique identifier for a SIP dialog). The call ID is used as call marker in almost all the voip related log file, such as /var/log/ngcp/kamailio-lb.log , /var/log/ngcp/kamailio-proxy.log , /var/log/ngcp/sems.log or /var/log/ngcp/rtp.log. Example of kamailio-proxy.log line:

Nov 19 00:35:56 sp1 proxy[7475]: NOTICE: <script>: New request on proxy - M=REGISTER R=sip:sipwise.local
F=sip:jdoe@sipwise.local T=sip:jdoe@sipwise.local IP=10.10.1.10:5060 (127.0.0.1:5060) ID=364e4676776621034977934e055d19ea@127.0.0.1 UA='SIP-UA 1.2.3.4'

The above line shows the SIP information you can find in a general line contained in /var/log/ngcp/kamailio-*:

In order to collect the full log related to a single call, it’s necessary to "grep" the /var/log/ngcp/kamailio-proxy.log using the ID= string, for example:

# grep "364e4676776621034977934e055d19ea@127.0.0.1" /var/log/ngcp/kamailio-proxy.log

The sip:provider CE platform provides several tools to collect SIP traces. It can be used the sip:provider CE ngrep-sip tool to collect SIP traces, for example to fetch traffic in text format from outbound and among load balancer, proxy and sems :

# ngrep-sip b

see the manual to know all the options:

# man ngrep-sip

The ngrep debian tool can be used in order to make a SIP trace and save it into a .pcap file :

# ngrep -s0 -Wbyline -d any -O /tmp/SIP_trace_file_name.pcap port 5062 or port 5060

The sngrep debian graphic tool as well can be used to visualize SIP trace and save them in a .pcap file :

# sngrep