Asterisk SIP custom authentication

I'm using ASTERISK to bridge sip calls inside my company.

Only authenticated/authorized users are allowed to make calls.

We already have a service that handles authentication, so is there any way to integrate the authentication from asterisk (sip.conf) to our service ?

So, instead of typing all users and passwords in sip.conf asterisk could simply call some API that communicates with our authentication service.

Basically I need a way to get the username/password from the SIP device and authenticate. Since each user has a different password it would become impractical to type it all inside sip.conf when we already have all the users/passwords in our database.

Thanks

Solution

There are plenty ways to do auth in asterisk

use asterisk realtime architecture, auth is via database(mysql/odbc). This one is HIGHLY recommended method. For realtime sip integration see this.
use exec include method(on reload execute external script which supply config). Will change config only on reloads. Check this link
use openser(kamailio/opensips) before asterisk, use avpairs with curl to got answer from your API. Your API has to be REALLY quick and you need to be an expert in opensips/kamailio.

Since all that is quite common things for asterisk, probably you need an asterisk expert to validate/security audit/performance audit for your system or you need someone from your staff to read some books like O'Reilly's Asterisk The Future Of Telephony just to understand some possible issues.