SRTP Fullform

SRTP stands for Secure Real-time Transport Protocol is a Real-time transport protocol that provides more features to RTP data such as encryption, authentication, integrity, and shielding against replay attacks or Denial of Service(DoS) attacks. It intercepts RTP packets and then forwards equivalent SRTP packets to the sending side. Moreover, it also intercepts SRTP packets and forwards the equivalent RTP packets to the receiving end.

Features :

• Features such as authentication and encryption are optional features and can be enabled or disabled as per requirement.
• It uses Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) as default cipher for encryption and decryption.
• It provides appropriate protection for a heterogeneous environment consisting of a combination of both wired or wireless connections.
• It provides the confidentiality of the RTP payload.
• It is independent of the transport, network, and physical layers used by RTP.
• SRTP uses two types of keys: session keys for providing cryptographic transform and master keys for deriving the session keys in a cryptographically secure manner.

Advantages :

• It can effortlessly accommodate new encryption algorithms.
• It is secure for both unicast and multicast RTP applications.
• It produces high throughput and low packet expansion.
• It has a low bandwidth and computational costs.
• It has a high tolerance to packet loss and reordering.

Disadvantages :

• It only encrypts the payload of RTP packets and not the RTP extension headers.
• It is only available for business applications and is hardly accessed by ordinary consumers.
• Selective Forwarding Mixer (SFM) needs to be used to optimize few RTP parameters when forwarding a portion of stream in case of multi-party conferencing. It acts as a mediator that disrupts the end-to-end security between the peer to peer systems.