A group will debut this week with the goal of raising awareness and spurring discussion of VoIP security needs.

The VoIP Security Alliance, which will appear at the RSA Conference, consists of about two dozen vendors, labs and other organizations.

With voice communications increasingly being sent as IP packets over LANs and the Internet, the question of how vulnerable this traffic may be gains in importance, the group says. That's because VoIP traffic could be subject to denial-of-service attacks and other threats just as IP-based data traffic is.

The group, which resides primarily online at www.voipsa.org and will meet monthly, plans to support development of publicly available tools for testing security in VoIP networks, says David Endler, a director at TippingPoint Technologies and chair of the VoIP Security Alliance. (3Com recently bought TippingPoint ).

Other alliance members include Alcatel, Avaya, Ernst and Young's Guiliani Advanced Security Center, Enterasys, the SANS Institute, Sourcefire, Spirent and Tenable Network Security.