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The real problem is the lack of security and authentication on telephone networks, which enables number spoofing with virtually no chance of reprisal -- foreign
by lend000 8y ago
The real problem is the lack of security and authentication on telephone networks, which enables number spoofing with virtually no chance of reprisal -- foreign callers (realistically out of the FCC's jurisdiction) use VoIP services to create calls that originate from an IP address from the telephone network's perspective, and the phone network makes no attempt to authenticate the metadata (like the phone number that is calling) before forwarding it on.
The 'neighborhood scam' is one which I am frequently subject to, and there is virtually nothing I can do about it (except block all the numbers with the same prefix as my own, but even this only covers the cases where they restrict their spoofed numbers to that small range).
Domestic callers like the one described in this article seem like a very small part of the problem, since they can be tracked and prosecuted. Foreign callers never pay the penalty with our current system, and I suspect they are more numerous based on the accents of most robocall operators I've gotten on the line.
- ikeboy 8y agoI've suggested in the past that every instance of provable spoofing where they did not control the claimed number should result in a fixed fine. $100 sounds about right. Every phone network will then quickly begin passing on that cost to anyone they "peer" with and it will be a non-issue soon enough. Is there a compelling reason to allow such spoofs?
- Rjevski 8y agoThere are legitimate reasons for spoofing to work given how fucked up the PSTN is. Mobile roaming is one for example - when you roam on another carrier and place a call, that carrier directly originates the call and “spoofs” your caller ID to make it look like the call originated from you. Some companies may use different carriers for either load balancing or least-cost routing and so both of these carriers are required to “spoof” the company’s caller ID. This can definitely be fixed with a CA system and “delegation” where the main carrier who owns the number can issue certificates for any other carrier you’d like to use to temporarily allow them to use a particular caller ID, and each call request should be signed with that certificate and the signature should be verified by call intermediate carriers down the chain, and the call dropped if the signature is missing or invalid.
- amluto 8y agoI think the correct approach is economic, not technical. Make a rule that, if you get a spoofed call, then your telco owes you $100, not subject to any arbitration clause or other contractual waiver. Give a way out to avoid actually killing the telcos: annual penalties are limited to a few percent of annual gross revenues. The telcos will find a technical solution real fast.
- bdamm 8y agoHow would you prove the call was spoofed? Record all calls? Prove it with statistics? No telco will pay. This is a technical problem.
- Lionsion 8y ago>> I think the correct approach is economic, not technical. > This is a technical problem. IMHO, it's both. Economic sanctions need to be put in place to motivate the telcos to create and adopt robust technical solutions.
- jimktrains2 8y agoYou have a call received on your monthly bill from a number and the owner of that number does not have the call on their bill.
- bdamm 8y agoHow? Even in the same city, cellular and land lines aren't always serviced by the same company. In most places I'm pretty sure it's illegal for phone companies to be swapping call data. Or are you suggesting I call back all the numbers that call me to compare bills with the owner on the other end? This plan is not going to work out.
- amluto 8y agoThe courts can deal with things like this.
- wtallis 8y ago> Is there a compelling reason to allow such spoofs? It makes telcos money. That's reason enough, since there are no economic downsides to the network operators that enable these crimes. If companies like AT&T and Verizon were also being subject to this $120M fine, we might see them decide to make caller ID trustworthy so that it could be used to block robocalls.
- nonbel 8y ago>"It makes telcos money." How?
- dbatten 8y agoTelcos charge for connecting phone calls and routing voice packets. Even robocallers have to pay those fees.
- flyinghamster 8y agoNot only that, but they also charge for Caller ID name lookups.
- nonbel 8y agoThis is interesting. So if I get a strange number and search 800notes.com or whatever the carrier is getting paid?
- flyinghamster 8y agoNo, this occurs at the telco level. When a call is placed, only the number is sent. The receiving exchange must look up that number to get the name, and that lookup costs some fraction of a cent. This is why Caller ID with name costs extra money.
- nonbel 8y agoSo if I don't answer, who is paying for the call? I thought unanswered calls were free for some reason.
- dqv 8y ago>Is there a compelling reason to allow such spoofs? A few use cases to spoof the number: * Appointment reminder systems - if I see the caller ID is from my doctor's office, I'm going to pick it up and hear the reminder. When the calls come from some other number, people think it's spam. People still expect reminder calls even if you/HN crowd would prefer an email/text. * Outbound call centers on behalf of others companies (same reason as above) * People who work from home but want to make business calls from a personal phone If no one could spoof, it probably result in a huge uptick of people claiming spam calls since they would be getting tons of calls from numbers they didn't know. There really needs to be an SPF, DKIM, DMARC for VOIP. I don't think a no spoofing policy would go over well for businesses or consumers.
- ikeboy 8y agoIn all of those scenarios, one could prove they controlled or had authorization for the spoofed number, hence it would not be eligible for my proposed fine. I'm not suggesting no spoofing, I'm suggesting a fine on the carrier for unauthorized spoofing, which will force them to actually verify that there is authorization.
- dqv 8y ago>had authorization for the spoofed number You didn't make this clarification in your first post. In the first two examples, they don't control the claimed number, which is what I was responding to. >I'm suggesting a fine on the carrier for unauthorized spoofing, which will force them to actually verify that there is authorization. This makes sense. Legitimate companies will get authorization agreements signed etc.
- wtallis 8y agoThe question wasn't about why spoofing exists at all. It was about spoofing where they did not control the claimed number. If you want to place a call with spoofed caller ID info, your provider should require you to prove that the spoofed information is legitimate, not fraudulent. Otherwise, the telco should be obligated to strip the suspect caller ID information from the call so that the recipient can properly identify the call as fishy. There's no need for any complicated cryptographic solution. Telcos should just be required to know their customer, much like banks, before allowing them to do certain things.
- mikekchar 8y agoI'm afraid I didn't read TFA, so apologies if I'm getting the wrong end of the stick. Also it's been 20 years since I worked in PSTN stuff. But at least at that time, the security in the protocol was ridiculously lax. IIRC, with PRI there was literally a bit that you set to say that the originating number was checked and was legitimate. Every other switch on the way through would accept it blindly. In most areas it was illegal to set that bit unless you were a telco. It was also illegal to sell equipment that set that bit unless you were selling it to a telco. But... it's not that hard to hack. Someone who's more current can probably give you better information. As to why nobody does anything about it... well.. why should they? They literally don't care. The equipment manufacturers aren't going to change the specs (because it's pretty darn hard to change specs and they are all trying to screw each other over in the specs anyway). The telcos aren't going to demand that the specs are changed because people are making telephone calls -- exactly what they want. It's only if the governments demand the change -- and it will take laws to do that (even then, I imagine that it's cheaper to lobby against the law than to change the equipment -- you have absolutely no idea how crappy those systems are).
- lend000 8y agoThe reason I would agree with a fine is not because a caller's identity cannot be unmasked, but because phone numbers are so closely connected with identity that robocallers are essentially engaging in identity theft and slander when they use people's legitimate numbers to spoof their calls.
- mark-r 8y agoI had someone call me once, claiming I had just called them. I hadn't of course, so the only thing I could think of was that someone had used my phone number for spoofing.
- Shivetya 8y agoDoesn't ANI work? When I worked at a business with a phone system used for time tracking we relied wholly on ANI as caller id is what is spoofed. However I am not sure if the ANI information is a paid for service or is it being spoofed as well? Caller ID data was always malleable and never to be trusted
- kj4ips 8y agoANI does not typically come with end-user lines, and is (sadly) also spoofable. There are already some systems for fraud analytics, but thye have their own issues. A user can request a "trace" (usually by dialing a feature code), but not only does this hit the user with a ~$20 fee each time, but the information gathered can only be released to law enforcement, and since local law enforcement would need to make the request, it rarely happens.
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- bradleyjg 8y agoWhat I don’t understand is why no major mobile carrier is offering a solution to this. It’s a pretty competitive market and this could be a big selling point. When the isp wars were going strong, before broadband put everyone under the thumb of monopolists and also before gmail, spam filtering was a serious competative advantage. Why can’t phone companies take an RBL like approach? If your VoIP service garners too many complaints because you are selling to robocallers then you don’t get to have calls delivered to e.g. ATT mobile customers anymore? Are there legal or technical interconnection requirements that would make such a thing impossible?
- mikeash 8y agoAT&T has a Call Protect app which attempts to do this. It misses some, but my spam call volume has dropped quite a bit with it.
- rconti 8y agoThanks, looking into it now. iOS and Android app. I'm curious to see how this works. Probably can't get in the way of the calls on the device itself; pushes changes to the network maybe? https://www.att.com/features/security-apps.html https://www.att.com/features/security-apps.html
- mikeash 8y agoSome of it is just a matter of associating the name “Telemarketer” with a phone number. I still see those calls, but can immediately identify them. Stuff it’s more confident about gets blocked outright. I think they’re automating what they’d do if you went into your account and manually blocked a number.
- rconti 8y agoI already have a /dev/null contact with a silent ringer but the telemarketers (especially the neighbor dialing) almost never uses the same number twice. Still hopeful the ATT app helps though.
- afo 8y agoWe (Nomorobo) protect you from both neighbor spoofing as well as "standard" robocalls. We add over 1,300+ new robocaller numbers every day. It's pretty crazy out there.
- bshep 8y agoI used Nomorobo for 6 months and it was NOT useful, i have a phone number from a area code + prefix that i dont live at, yet I get about 5-10calls/day from similar looking numbers. Nomorobo would mark them as ‘unblockable’ because of the areacode+prefix match, so i would have to manually block each one. I switched to ATT Call Protect which works much better. Now i get 1-2 calls/week. I would go back to nomorobo if it worked better.
- afo 8y agoWe updated the app based on that feedback. We used to show "unblockable" because there was a problem with false positives. Lots of families had sequential numbers that were accidentally getting blocked. Now, if you give us access to your contacts (local processing only, never transmitted to our servers) we can completely block them.
- bshep 8y agoI’ll give it another go. Thanks for the info.
- njarboe 8y agoThe telephone system, in the US at least, could charge people extra for calling a number with the extra charge going to the person/company that was called (those famous 900 numbers, now gone, that kids would call and rack up $10000 phone bills.) It seems to me that it would be pretty easy to set up a system where, if a person is not in my contact list, they get charged some amount of money to call me. Setting it at 5 or 10 cents would be enough to kill almost all of these spam calls and not deter a real person from calling you.
- Paul-ish 8y agoThe FCC at some point considered requiring authentication numbers or attaching names to numbers. They ultimately rejected the idea. There were multiple reasons why they rejected it, but from talking to someone at the FCC one of the reasons they rejected connecting numbers to identities too strongly is that victims of domestic abuse may need to call their abuser (eg about child support), but do so without giving away too much information (like address).