voip calea interfaces

Eric A. Hall ehall at ehsco.com
Tue Jun 20 18:44:04 UTC 2006



On 6/20/2006 1:33 PM, Fred Baker wrote:

> Yes, the vendors are aware of this. Our legal people track it pretty  
> closely, and we have been dealing with the issues in Europe,  
> Australia, and a number of other places for quite a while. We talk  
> directly with legislators, regulators, and various police entities.

I was more curious about operators but this is interesting

> http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3924.txt
> 3924 Cisco Architecture for Lawful Intercept in IP Networks. F. Baker,
>       B. Foster, C. Sharp. October 2004. (Format: TXT=40826 bytes)  
> (Status:
>       INFORMATIONAL)

This is interesting approach. For one, it seems to cover a lot more
technology than CALEA requires. I suppose that is an artifact of trying to
serve multiple countries' requiresments in a single architecture.

Also, to my knowledge the FCC/FBI have not yet agreed to accept any kind
of pure packet-level intercept interfaces as meeting LEA requirements. The
only "approved" interfaces I know of are for telco and cellular networks
(see http://www.askcalea.net/standards.html). Until they approve a
packet-based interface like you describe, it remains unapproved by
default, meaning that it would not count to satisfy the CALEA
requirements, right? You said that you put this to ETSI; have you put it
to the FCC and FBI for approval as a qualified interface?

Along those same lines... given that the covered VoIP providers are mostly
going to be interfacing to PSTN, my general assumption is that they will
use 3rd party gear to provide the supported CALEA interfaces, and then
interface that device into their VoIP infrastructure somehow (this assumes
the operator isn't using a real switch with CALEA interfaces already
built-in). A pure packet-based interface would be cheaper and better than
that, but given the reasons above it seems unlikely in the short term.

-- 
Eric A. Hall                                        http://www.ehsco.com/
Internet Core Protocols          http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/



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