The Secure Telephony Identity Revisited (STIR) system adds information to your SIP headers for identification purposes, allowing upstream points in the network to decide whether or not to trust that specific Caller ID.

The Signature-based Handling of Asserted information using toKENs (SHAKEN) is a set of standard rules meant to be adopted by the carriers in order to be able to process STIR information across the network.

Caller ID masking is a form of spoofing use by robocallers for nefarious reasons by tricking people into thinking they are receiving calls from a local or legitimate entity. With the advent of the voice-over-IP telecom systems, this type of spoofing started to be more and more prevalent.

STIR/SHAKEN comes as a technical solution that will help fight these types of actions at a carrier level, nationwide.

Depending on the level of legitimacy, the system divides the numbers into three types:

Full Attestation (Class A): when a SHAKEN STIR carrier knows the individual or the entity making a phone call, and they know the phone number or know the phone number belongs to the individual or entity, and that they are therefore authorized to use the number.

Partial Attestation (Class B): The carrier doesn’t necessarily have all the information. So, they might know the caller individual or entity and trust them, but don’t recognize the number and cannot attest that they are authorized to use that number for their calls.

Gateway Attestation (Class C): Basically, this is just a transiting call, an international number that did not originate on a known network. The carrier doesn’t know the customer. They can still say the call passed through the network. The service provider can see the location of the call they received, but they have no authorization for the source, nor can they verify if it is authorized to use the number.

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