Everybody Hates Robocalls: What Can We Do About It?

Abstract:
Telephone spam costs United States consumers around $8.6 billion annually. In 2014, the Federal Trade Commission has received over 22 million complaints of illegal and wanted calls. Telephone spammers today are leveraging recent technical advances in the telephony ecosystem to distribute massive automated spam calls known as robocalls. Given that anti-spam techniques and approaches are effective in the email domain: Why are we not solved phone spam? We believe that one technical reason is that, in the current calling line identification presentation scheme, the caller ID is trivially spoofed.

This talk will discuss the current state-of-the-art in telephony scams, and will propose an authentication scheme that provides the possibility of a security indicator for the Caller ID service (similar to the browser’s “green lock” security indicator). We argue that standardization is necessary to protect users and prevent them from falling victim to phone impersonation scams, as well as provide a foundation for future defenses to stop unwanted calls based on the caller ID information.

Bio:
Dr. Adam Doupé is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering (CIDSE) at Arizona State University. Prior to joining Arizona State University, he received MS (2009) and PhD (2014) degrees in Computer Science from UC Santa Barbara. His research interests include vulnerability analysis, web security, mobile security, network security, and hacking competitions. He was awarded the Top 5% Faculty Teaching Award for the Fulton Schools of Engineering at ASU for 2015, and he received the NSF CAREER award in 2017.