InCharge Systems released a hosted reference system of its ACerted Trust solution, available immediately for interoperability testing. The reference system, will be demonstrated Thursday, October 29, 2009 at the Illinois Institute of Technology 5th Annual VoIP Conference and Expo.

ACerted Trust is a solution for assuring the identity of end users and their operators that originate SIP requests for voice, video, presence or messaging communication sessions, based on the Internet Engineering Task Force standard RFC 4474, “Enhancements for Authenticated Identity Management in the Session Initiation Protocol”

In VoIP telephony today, the calling line identity presented to the receiver of a phone call can be easily altered if the communication traverses the open Internet, making those communications subject to abuse by unscrupulous telemarketers, vishing attacks for financial and identity information, theft of toll service and other serious problems. ACerted Trust assigns a cryptographic signature to SIP:INVITE messages, allowing receiving entities to check with a trusted certificate authority to verify the identity asserted by the caller. This enables the identity of the caller to be verified at any point in a communication, regardless of network operator.

The reference system released today is intended to support the implementation by the industry of RFC 4474 in various VoIP and SIP products and services, such as:

• IP-PBXs, SIP-aware firewalls, session border controllers and softswitches.
• End user devices such as IP phones, analog telephone adapters and software user agents such as PC softphones and mobile VoIP clients on smart phones.
• Services and gateways such as SIP peering federations, SIP call termination providers and VoIP communication services providers
• Consumer Internet and business process applications using SIP to embed voice, instant messaging and presence.

Today’s release for interoperability testing comprises the following hosted elements: a public / private key provisioning system, a certificate authority and a SIP proxy server that will allow the validation of calls based on their digital signature, as well as demonstrate the signing of SIP messages.

In addition to the reference system, ICS has contributed to the popular open source Asterisk IP PBX system a software module that implements support for RFC 4474 and interoperates with the ICS hosted reference system.