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- STIR/SHAKEN, or SHAKEN/STIR, is a suite of protocols and procedures intended to combat caller ID spoofing on public telephone networks. Caller ID spoofing is used by robocallers to mask their identity or to make it appear the call is from a legitimate source, often a nearby phone number with the same area code and exchange, or from well-known agencies like the Internal Revenue Service or Ontario Provincial Police. This sort of spoofing is common for calls originating from voice-over-IP (VoIP) systems, which can be located anywhere in the world. STIR, short for Secure Telephony Identity Revisited, has been defined as a series of RFC standards documents by a Working Group of the Internet Engineering Task Force. It works by adding a digital certificate to the Session Initiation Protocol information used to initiate and route calls in VoIP systems. The first public connection on the system, typically the VoIP service provider, examines the caller ID and compares it to a known list of IDs they provide to that customer. The provider then attaches an encrypted certificate to the SIP header with the service provider's identity and a trust value. VoIP software on the receiving end can check the authenticity of the message by decrypting STIR using the provider's public key. For non-VoIP systems, like cell phones and landlines, call routing information is carried by SS7. In these cases, the SIP header is not directly useful as it cannot be sent to users unless they are on a VoIP connection. This is the purpose of the SHAKEN system, short for Signature-based Handling of Asserted information using toKENs. SHAKEN is a suite of guidelines for public switched telephone networks that indicate how to deal with calls that have incorrect or missing STIR information. This may be in the form of additional information in the CNAM information of caller ID indicating the number has been spoofed, but the details have not been finalized. As of 2019, STIR/SHAKEN is a major ongoing effort in the United States, which is suffering an "epidemic" of robocalls. The Federal Communications Commission requires use of the protocols by June 30, 2021. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission requires use of the protocols by November 30, 2021. The name was inspired by Ian Fleming's character James Bond, who famously prefers his martinis "shaken, not stirred." STIR having existed already, the creators of SHAKEN "tortured the English language until [they] came up with an acronym." (en)
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