InCharge Systems has released a hosted reference system of its ACerted Trust solution, which is available now for interoperability testing.

ACerted Trust assures the identity of end users and their operators that originate session initiation protocol (SIP) requests for voice, video, presence or messaging communication sessions, based on the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard RFC 4474, “Enhancements for Authenticated Identity Management in the Session Initiation Protocol (News - Alert).”

In a release, John Nix, vice president for Technology Development at ICS, called this latest offers the “first industry release” of a public test system for RFC 4474. He asked the industry to use this free system to accelerate their development of compliant products, and put in place the components necessary to bring identity and security to voice over Internet protocol (VoIP).

If the communication traverses the open Internet, the calling line identity presented to the receiver of a phone call can be easily altered in VoIP telephony. Company officials said that this makes 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, enabling receiving entities to check with a trusted certificate authority to verify the identity asserted by the callers.

Company officials said that this enables the identity of the caller to be verified at any point in a communication, regardless of network operator.

The released reference system 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.

In addition, services and gateways such as SIP peering federations, SIP call termination providers and VoIP communication services providers; and consumer of Internet and business process applications using SIP to embed voice, instant messaging and presence can benefit from this release.

This newest release for interoperability testing comprises of hosted elements, including a public / private key provisioning system, a certificate authority and a SIP proxy server. Company officials said that the certificate authority will allow the validation of calls based on their digital signature, and also demonstrate the signing of SIP messages.