Tom Keating has an interesting post. Allegedly, Paris Hilton (yep, that Paris Hilton) used spoofcard.com to break into somebody’s voicemail by means of claiming their caller ID as her own. And that somebody, allegedly, was Lindsay Lohan (yep, that Lindsay Lohan).

Now, while some might prefer we keep talking about the cat fights of young Hollywood types, I would rather point out that the management of trust has long been a standing problem for Internet applications. E-mail for example: if you know slightly more SMTP than a monkey, then it’s very easy to spoof the e-mail address of anybody you want. This is the root cause of today’s MASSIVE spam problem. There are solutions to the problem, like Sender Policy Framework and digital signatures, but the masses must adopt them before they can be of any benefit to the collective body of users.

Telephony applications, even legacy ones like cell-phone voicemail, which are based on explicit trust for unique identification of users, are equally at risk for abuse. Kind of throws the whole “PSTN is more secure than VoIP” garbagetalk right out the window, doesn’t it?

Going forward, as the global voice network becomes increasingly dependent upon DNS, it will become very important for DNS infrastructure to support authentication, so that trust doesn’t have to be the only option. Granted, SIP peering arrangements will cut down on the amount of abuse that goes on, but what we really want is a free and open voice mesh, one that has a singular, well-established protocol for authenticating the user of a particular domain when they call you on your softphone.

Of course, they’ve been talking about doing this with DNS for twelve years or more.  Where does it stand today?  One need only look at your spam folder for the answer.