STIR/SHAKEN: Everything You Need to Know

Robocalls have become a major concern in many countries and the USA is leading this space with around 50 billion robocalls received in 2021, according to Robocallindex History. Out of all these, around 40% of calls were fraud calls. Robocalls along with caller ID spoofing are a big threat and that has been happening across countries for many years. The call recipient often finds this caller as someone they know or someone from authority and becomes an easy victim of technology that is invented for our betterment. VoIP is invented and has been going through various innovations to benefit businesses and end users, but frauds and hackers use it to meet their malicious intent. This has made the implementation of STIR/SHAKEN in VoIP solutions by VoIP software development companies or VoIP service providers necessary. 

In fact, since June 30, 2021 implementation of STIR/SHAKEN standards has been made mandatory by FCC (Federal Communications Commission) in the USA to protect the interests of customers from fraud callers.   

What is STIR/SHAKEN? 

In simple words, it is a mechanism that is used to authenticate the identity of the caller using technology standards. It can even reject the call before reaching the recipient if the caller fails to prove that the identity used by him or her is genuine. This is a completely automated process of authenticating the caller and evaluating the trustworthiness of the caller ID, name, and number. 

STIR is an acronym for Secure Telephone Identity Revisited. SHAKEN is an acronym for Signature-based Handling of Asserted Information Using toKENs (SHAKEN). These are standards defined to deploy a mechanism by a VoIP development company to assess the legitimacy of the caller. 

It is usually used by carriers for carrying out legitimacy checks for numbers for calls transmitting through their network. 

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