Caller-ID spoofing has been an issue in most countries since networks went digital.

SS7 doesn’t provide any caller ID validation facilities, with the assumption that everyone you have peered with you trust the calls from. So because of this it’s up to the originating switch to verify the caller ID selected by the caller is valid and permissible, something that’s not often implemented. Some SIP providers sell the ability to present any number as your CLI as a “feature”.

There’s heaps of news articles on the topic, but I thought it’d be worth talking about RFC4474 – Designed for cryptographically identifying users that originate SIP requests. While almost never used it’s a cool solution to a problem that didn’t take off.

It does this by adding a new header field, called Identity, for conveying a signature used for validating the identity of the caller, and Identity-Info for a reference to the certificate signing authority.

The calling proxy / UA creates a hash of it’s certificate, and inserts that into the SIP message in the Identity header.

The calling proxy / UA also inserts a “Identity-Info” header containing

The called party can then independently get the certificate, create it’s own hash of it, and if they match, then the identity of the caller has been verified.