Lawful Interception in WebRTC Peer-To-Peer Communication

Lawful interception is the act of giving law enforcement officials access to communication between private individuals or organizations. According to the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), service providers are expected to ensure that the entire contents of communication associated with the target identity being intercepted can be intercepted during the entire period of the lawful authorization, and that the delivery of the interception related information is reliable. In traditional telephone networks, authorized surveillance takes place by duplicating the conversation data at the service provider premises and forwarding it to law enforcement agencies (LEA). The same approach is suitable for VoIP communication, as long as the data is transferred via a mediator located on the service provider’s premises. Today, direct VoIP communication between clients is the preferred approach due to better call quality and reduced network footprint. Although, VoIP service providers are obliged to provide lawful interception according to ETSI, the traditional model for lawful interception is no longer applicable for direct VoIP communication. In this article, we present a technique to intercept direct VoIP communication between two clients using the state of the art WebRTC technology. This paper addresses an important unmet need of service providers to enable lawful interception in P2P VoIP calls. The new approach maintains high performance without degrading the user experience.