Thank you Richard, it does sound like DTLS is an improvement then.

I was asking whether OpenSSL was used because of a question we had about FIPS validation. FIPS requires that all cryptography components go through a validation process, which some versions of OpenSSL (but not all) have done.

My understanding is that RTPengine uses OpenSSL for the AES, but not for all of the key functions. Is that right? If so then even if we're using a FIPS validated version of OpenSSL, not all of the cryptography components of RTPengine would be using it, so we wouldn't be fully FIPS validated.

On Wed, 10 Apr 2024 at 22:50, Richard Fuchs via sr-users <sr-users@lists.kamailio.org> wrote:

On 09/04/2024 23.14, Alex Balashov via sr-users wrote:
Exchanging keys directly in the SDP body is rather suboptimal from a security standpoint, even if the signalling is encrypted, but it's certainly simpler. 

I suppose that makes DTLS "more secure", but in every other sense, I'm not sure DTLS is "better". W3C WebRTC standards mandate DTLS-SRTP, as far as I know, so I suppose it's more fit for that purpose.
To add to that, one benefit DTLS has over SDES is that key exchange can happen as soon as media can flow, which theoretically can be immediately after the initial offer (invite), especially if ICE is also in use, as is the case with WebRTC. Whereas with SDES, since key exchange happens in-line with the signalling, key exchange can only be completed once an answer to the initial offer has been received. Which means that at least in theory DTLS is faster to establish media than SDES is. (Caveat: Not all DTLS clients actually allow this.)

As for security: The most commonly used SRTP key types that can be exchanged are the same between SDES and DTLS, so in this aspect neither is more secure than the other. As for key exchange itself, DTLS is more sophisticated as it uses a peer-to-peer (with rtpengine being one of the peers in your case) public-key exchange to set up SRTP, whereas SDES relies on the signalling transport to be encrypted, which almost certainly isn't the case peer-to-peer (i.e. any involved signalling gateway or proxy can inspect or possibly modify the keys).

In theory DTLS also allows extra trust to be established via verification of the DTLS certificates, but in practice this isn't usually done as the certificates are often self-signed.

Cheers
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