Robocalls have been a plague for telephony consumers. Robocalling grew over 100% in 2019 to more than 50 Billion annoying and often illegal calls. With spoofed phone numbers it’s often hard for consumers to tell if a call is from a friendly neighbor, or a scammer halfway around the world. Many people have simply stopped answering their phones. Is there now a solution within reach?
STIR/SHAKEN is the standard that will be used to minimise and eventually eliminate Robocall spam. This standard is getting widely adopted and regulators are starting to mandate it for all licensed operators, starting with the FCC in the USA, CRTC in Canada and Europe will surely follow.
Compliance with the STIR/SHAKEN will have several components, but at its core, the SIP headers of each call invite will contain an encrypted token validating the sender and the caller ID authenticity which can be decrypted and confirmed at the receiving end.
The SBC can act as all the components needed for SHAKEN and decide for the subscribers when to reject calls based on the authentication of the caller.
The Dialogic BorderNet SBC enables all flavors of STIR/SHAKEN by playing the role of all the four components:
- 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 Dialogic BorderNet SBC can play all of these roles or combinations of them, in concert with third-party services. The Dialogic BorderNet SBC can also act as a SHAKEN server for other components in the network using RESTful APIs.
A simple flow where the BorderNet SBC acts as STI-AS and STI-VS (while SKS and STI-CR are external) will look like this:
If you enjoyed my musings, and would like to read more about our thoughts on the future of the Session Border Controller, we invite you to download our new Enghouse whitepaper “The SBC, From Here to Eternity: Five industry shifts your Dialogic BorderNet Session Border Controller (SBC) will help you manage in times of crisis”.
Let’s start a discussion on stopping Robocalls through STIR/SHAKEN and ensuring compliance with these new and evolving regulations!
