FCC to require anti-robocall tech after "voluntary" plan didn't work out:
Phone companies would be required to deploy technology that prevents spoofing of Caller ID under a plan announced today by Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai.
Pai framed it as his own decision, with his announcement saying the chairman "proposed a major step forward... to protect consumers against spoofed robocalls." But in reality the FCC was ordered by Congress and President Trump to implement this new rule. The requirement on the FCC was part of the TRACED Act that was signed into law in December 2019. Pai previously hoped that all carriers would deploy the technology voluntarily.
"I'm excited about the proposal I'm advancing today: requiring phone companies to adopt a caller ID authentication framework called STIR/SHAKEN," Pai said in his announcement. "Widespread implementation will give American consumers a lot more peace of mind when they pick up the phone." The FCC will vote on the measure at its March 31 meeting.
Previously:
AT&T Ramps Up its Fight Against Robocalls With Call Validation Feature
FCC Approves Plan to Stop Robocalls!
Anti-Robocall Bill Passes Senate
The Robocall Crisis Will Never Totally be Fixed
FCC Pushes Carriers to Implement Caller ID Authentication by 2019
Robocallers "Evolved" to Sidestep New Call Blocking Rules, 35 State AGs Tell FCC
(Score: 3, Informative) by driverless on Sunday March 08 2020, @07:16AM
It is a lead balloon. In particular:
takes a basic signalling protocol, SS7, and adds X.509 certificates, public-key management, CAs, the whole three hundred yards. It's a typical geeks solution, instead of addressing it via changes to interconnect agreements between carriers, which are already in place but the carriers have no incentive to act on them, they add a massively complex pretty much guaranteed-to-fail layer of cryptographic bloat on top of things... which the carriers still have no incentive to act on, however now they can point at the PKI bloat and say they tried but, to their complete surprise, they couldn't make it work.