Rich Call Data and Delegate Certificates—a great combo

Rich Call Data and Delegate Certificates are a powerful combination. They will provide great value to enterprise callers by making their outbound calls trusted. Let’s have a look at how these things work, and what’s needed to bring them into widespread adoption.

Rich Call Data

Rich Call Data (RCD) provides caller information with a call, such as caller display name. It can include other information too, for example, a link to an image file with the picture of the caller or a company logo. It can include text that explains the call reason.

Providing such information can help persuade people to answer phone calls. It enables enterprises to present their calls with a consistent brand image to improve trust and call completion.

Rich Call Data—Hypothetical Example

RCD information is part of STIR/SHAKEN. It’s included in the SHAKEN PASSporT and digitally signed using the SHAKEN Public Key Infrastructure. This makes it reliable and trusted.

RCD information is maintained by the caller and their service provider. This means that it is accurate and up to date.

What’s needed to deploy RCD? This information can be included in SHAKEN PASSporTs today. However, a few things are needed to make it usable:

• RCD support on telephone handsets. Caller display name is available now, and that’s well worth RCD deployment. Support for other RCD information must be provided by handset manufacturers to be usable.
• RCD support by Originating Service Providers (OSPs). The OSP needs to be doing SHAKEN, and their SHAKEN solution needs to support RCD. They can either construct RCD claims in calls they originate and/or accept calls with RCD claims signed by delegate certificates (more about this below).
• RCD adoption by callers. Enterprise callers are the most likely early adopters. There’s a tremendous benefit for them to use RCD with their outbound calls.

Delegate certificates

If an enterprise has their calls originated by just one OSP and that OSP will sign their calls with SHAKEN using RCD, then they should be ready to go. However, many enterprises might use many OSPs and have some of their calls made by call centers. These use cases make it difficult to arrange for SHAKEN and RCD on all of their calls.

Delegate certificates can help.

Delegate certificates extend the SHAKEN governance and trust model to enable VoIP entities to sign their calls with digital certificates. Call information can include RCD.

Delegate Certificates Extend the Chain of Trust

There are many use cases for delegate certificates, but they include situations where an enterprise could sign its own calls or have a call center sign calls it makes on their behalf.

These signed calls would use either base PASSporTs or RCD PASSporTs. These PASSporTs would contain RCD information, and they would be signed with delegate certificates.

A downstream SHAKEN-authorized service provider could use the digitally signed PASSporT and RCD claims to justify creating a SHAKEN PASSporT with RCD information and full attestation.

It’s easy to see why enterprise managers are so excited about the benefits that delegate certificates and RCD will provide.

The delegate certificate standard, ATIS-1000092, is approved. Next steps for deployment include:

• The Policy Administrator must enhance their systems to accept requests for SPC tokens that Telephone Number (TN) providers will use to request Subordinate CA certificates.
• TN providers must decide to get Subordinate CA certificates and issue delegate certificates to customers that want them.
• Certificate Authorities must be ready to issue Subordinate CA certificates.

There seems to be support for these things by several industry participants. Stay tuned for future developments on this.

More information

See our whitepapers on Rich Call Data and Delegate Certificates for more information on how these capabilities work.

TransNexus solutions

We offer STIR/SHAKEN and robocall mitigation solutions in our ClearIP and NexOSS software platforms. We can make your STIR/SHAKEN deployment a smooth process.

In addition, we help service providers with all aspects of STIR/SHAKEN deployment, including registering with the Policy Administrator and filing their certification with the FCC.

Contact us today to learn more.