I'd like to address something that I haven't seen any posts about yet on here, and that's server security. Unfortunately, I'm still very much of a newbie when it comes to Yate and SIP servers in general, so I don't have any good answers to my question. I would like to know if anyone out there has any experience using Yate in a production environment or has learned to secure their server beyond the default configuration.
I recently followed this guide on using Yate to communicate with Google Voice (
http://docs.yate.ro/wiki/Connecting_To_Google_Voice), and that remains the only changes I have made beyond the default configuration. While attempting to debug some communication issues, I had Yate running via command line with "yate-console.exe -Dt -l log.txt". Within 5 hours of starting the server, my log file had grown to 2GB in size. I quickly stopped the server and looked in the config file to find countless call entries with a user-agent of a "friendly-scanner". Searching this on Google turned up a number of pages about SIP bots. Due to the sheer number of entries from this bot, it would take me a very long time to figure out what exactly they were trying to do, but clearly I now have reason to worry about using my server.
What concerns me is that I am operating the latest version of Yate with the default configuration, changing ONLY what was recommended to me on Yate's documentation for using Google Voice. Fortunately, I was able to detect this exploit due to another user on the forum's help in suggesting file logging. I worry there are countless others using Yate that are unaware of what's happening on their machines.
In any case, I am posting here in hopes someone has experience securing Yate server, perhaps for production purposes. The SIP user I had configured was using a strong, 8-character password with a non-default user name. I will be changing the password to a much longer, more secure password, but I am still hesitant to leave Yate running for very long. I do not host any public services from my IP, so I am genuinely surprised I was discovered so quickly.
If anybody has any experience with this or general security tips for SIP, please let me know!