An affordable solution for authenticated communications for enterprise and personal use

The top complaint received by both the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and Federal Communications Commission is illegal robocalling. One of the issues enabling illegal robocalling is the relative ease of a bad actor to spoof, or lie, about who is calling. Specifically, the bad actor can set their Caller ID, or the number that is displayed when one receives a phone call, to whatever they want. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the SIP Forum, and the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS) have been jointly working on a solution, called STIR, to provide authentication services for the asserted caller ID. However, the focus of that work, particularly by the joint ATIS/SIP Forum Network-Network Interconnect Work Group, has been on service providers doing the authentication and verification. This article describes an implementation of the STIR technology targeted for small enterprise and consumer use. Our implementation is the first to be suitable for the enterprise environment. It is extremely lightweight and affordable, while still providing necessary security and integrity. We deployed our implementation in an enterprise environment, building upon the open source Kamailio SIP server.