Papers for

telephony device manufacturers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Blockchain verifies caller ID without fees or full chain storage

BVI: Lightweight, Data-Centric Blockchain-Based Verification of Identity Claims

Abstract: A person who answers an unexpected call claiming to come from a bank has no way to check the claim. Australian text messaging has labelled a message as unverified when the sender identifier is not registered since 1 July 2026, but a voice call still arrives with nothing behind it, and voice cloning has removed the last cue recipients relied on. We present BVI, which answers one question for the recipient: did the calling party prove it holds a credential a registered organisation issued for this call? BVI keeps the organisational record, its authorised channels and its revocation state on a public ledger in a directly queryable form, and puts all decision logic in the handset, which performs eleven checks, pays no transaction fee and holds no full-chain state. We define ten attack classes plus the case in which revocation cannot be resolved, compare them in a 10-by-4 coverage matrix spanning BBCA, the content digest, the detector and composed BVI, and run 27 automated scenario tests against isolated Hardhat fixture states of the BVI contract; all 27 pass. For media substitution and synthetic speech, the contract tests validate commitment and gating properties rather than claiming detector accuracy. The mandatory per-session anchor costs about 91.5k gas and is invariant in call duration and hop count; each participating intermediary additionally contributes one optional attestation write. In a 20,000-session-per-cell path simulation, at one quarter carrier participation BVI detects 20.6 per cent of randomly located in-path rewrites versus 0.1 per cent for the every-hop comparison, while identity and content evidence remain available even when path evidence is indeterminate. We also quantify the throughput ceiling of the anchoring design.

Mon 5 OctCryptography and Security
The gist
Phone scams happen because people can't easily check if a caller is really from their bank or another trusted organization. The authors created BVI, a tool that helps your phone check if the caller has a valid credential issued by the organization they claim to represent, using blockchain technology. BVI keeps important records publicly, but the phone does all the checking itself, so it doesn't need to store lots of data or pay extra fees. The system was tested thoroughly to catch many types of attacks, especially those involving fake or altered calls.
Open → 2610.07531v1