Anyone with a telephone will know what a plague robocalls have become. During 2019, more than 50 billion annoying and frequently plain illegal calls were made. This represents a growth of over 100%.
By using a spoofed phone number it’s next to impossible for your average consumer to predict if a call is from a friendly neighbour or a scammer calling from halfway around the world. During lockdowns with more people at home, many people simply stopped answering their phones.
Is there any kind of solution within reach?
STIR/SHAKEN is set to be the Answer
All set to minimise and eventually eliminate Robocall spam is STIR/SHAKEN. This is a suite of protocols and procedures intended to combat caller ID spoofing on public telephone networks.
This standard is rapidly being adopted, with regulators beginning to make it mandatory for all licensed operators. Where the FCC in the USA leads, CRTC in Canada and Europe are almost certain to follow.
How will it work?
There will be a number of components to ensure compliance with STIR/SHAKEN, but at its core, the SIP headers of each call will contain an encrypted token. This token will validate the sender and the ID authenticity, this will then, in turn, be decrypted and confirmed at the receiving end.
The Session Border Controller (SBC) can provide all of the components needed for SHAKEN and can decide for subscribers when to reject any calls based on the authentication or otherwise of the caller.
What are the Four Components?
The Enghouse BorderNet SBC can fulfill the role of all four components required by STIR/SHAKEN. These are:
- STI-AS: Secure Telephone Identity Authentication Service
- STI-CR: Secure Telephone Identity Certificate Repository
- STI-VS: Secure Telephone Identity Verification Service
- SKS: Secure Key Store
The Enghouse BorderNet SBC can fulfill all of these roles, or combinations of them, alone or in conjunction with relevant third-party services. It can also act as a SHAKEN server for other network components by using RESTful APIs.
Learn More
You can learn more about the future of the Session Border Controller by downloading our new Enghouse Executive Summary “STIR/SHAKEN – Now is the Time”.
Ensuring compliance with the developing regulations through STIR/SHAKEN offers a real opportunity to stop the plague of robocalls.
Let’s start a discussion about how we make it happen!
