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by hedora
1645 days ago
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The phone companies standardized on a hopelessly insecure protocol in 1975, and have no financial incentive to fix it. If the FCC mandated a $1/spam call fine for cell phone providers (automatically paid as an unbounded rebate to subscribers), I suspect they would fix it in under 12 months. More reading on the protocol (Signaling System 7) is here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_System_No._7 The fundamental issue is that is assumes 100% of global telephone exchanges are trustworthy. |
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I vaguely remember an interview with somebody involved in early ARPANET standardization efforts stating pretty definitively that the prevailing direction for network protocols was source based routing. Anybody who has ever had to write an email address parser has seen vestiges of this (multiple @, ! and : symbols). Supposedly a representative from the NSA helpfully "suggested" they abandon that line of thinking and just mimic the PSTN's approach of trusting the next hop to do the routing.
I wonder how accidental it is that SS7 was implemented in such a plainly insecure manner.