Fraudulent communications such as number spoofing are becoming an increasingly serious problem as robocalls proliferate and artificial intelligence grows more capable of impersonating people’s voices convincingly. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has developed new standards aimed at addressing this exact problem, built around digital public-key certificates designed to authenticate calling-line identification (CLI) and confirm that a call or message genuinely originates from the party it claims to come from. An ITU roundtable co-organized with India’s Department of Telecommunications alongside India Mobile Congress on October 9 will discuss the practical dimensions of implementing these standards and explore the potential for a supporting proof-of-concept initiative, with the session open to anyone interested and also available online.
The new standards were developed by ITU-T Study Group 11, which focuses on protocols, testing, and combating counterfeiting, and provides a structured set of tools for resolving the CLI authentication problem. ITU standard Q.3057 specifies the underlying architecture and trust anchor model, Q.3062 specifies the signalling procedures and structure of protected messages, and Q.3063 specifies the actual procedures for CLI authentication itself. Associated amendments to existing ITU standards Q.763 and Q.931, both covering Signalling System 7, along with Q.1902.3 for Bearer Independent Call Control, specify the protocol extensions needed to carry the digital certificate, the signature, and the authentication result across existing telecommunications infrastructure.
Two additional ITU standards currently in their approval process will further extend this toolset for CLI authentication using digital signatures. The upcoming Q.3070 standard will specify new requirements for issuing the certificates themselves, along with a mechanism for sharing trust anchor information to ensure authentication remains reliable across national borders, since fraudulent calls frequently originate from or pass through networks in different countries. A companion governance framework and set of operational requirements will be provided by another forthcoming standard, E.1122, developed by ITU-T Study Group 2, which focuses on operational aspects of telecommunications regulation and implementation.
As these new standards near completion, the roundtable in India is intended to help governments and telecom companies gain and share practical experience implementing the required technical mechanisms before wider rollout begins. The discussion will examine what actual implementation involves in practice, along with the specific national priorities and constraints different countries and operators might face when adopting certificate-based CLI authentication. It will also explore how an ITU proof-of-concept initiative could help test solutions built to the new standards and gather lessons learned to inform future standards work, giving regulators and telecom operators worldwide a clearer roadmap for deploying technology that could meaningfully reduce the kind of spoofing and impersonation scams that have grown more sophisticated alongside advances in AI voice cloning.
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