There"s a new acronym on the lips of technology vendors that may sound a bit offensive at first blush. You may not yet have heard of SPIT (Spam for Internet Telephony), but according to some technology visionaries, you may soon be swimming in it.

Speaking at the InBox:IT 2005 e-mail conference here Wednesday, Brad Garlinghouse, who is Yahoo"s vice president of communications products, mentioned SPIT in a talk about the convergence of IP communications.

"VOIP is enabling a new type of spam," Garlinghouse said.

During the recent U.S. presidential campaign, Garlinghouse said he received several automated calls on his IP phone from famous campaign figures such as Karl Rove.

Within two years SPIT will be a significant problem, Garlinghouse said. The future threat of SPIT is an example of the need to apply authentication to other types of inboxes, not just e-mail inboxes.

SPIT may be in its infancy, but it turns out that vendors are already mobilizing for the SPIT fight.

On Wednesday a company called Kayote Networks announced a security initiative in partnership with Check Point Software Technologies and XConnect Global Networks to develop a framework for detecting and preventing SPIT.

The idea, according to Kayote Networks, is to enhance existing network security measures by collecting and passing additional information along on a call by call basis. SPIT threatens to inundate VOIP phones with hundreds of automated calls.

Kayote Networks is providing a VOIP Security Server to demonstrate a method for embedding information related to the potential SPIT threat associated with a call. The data is passed using attributes coded into a SAML body that is sent with SIP signaling messages. More information can be found at spitprevention.net.