PHONE CALL LINE NOISE COULD PROVIDE I.D.:

Just as people’s voices betray hints of the region they originate from, so, it turns out, do phone calls. Handsets, telephone exchanges, and other call-routing infrastructure imprint subtle and almost unique fingerprints onto the audio of any phone call, a phenomenon that security company Pindrop hopes to use to prevent fraudsters from using stolen credit cards over the phone.

“We can identify whether a person is using a landline or cell phone, or when a call supposed to come from a mobile in Atlanta comes from a landline in Nigeria,” says Vijay Balasubramaniyan, CEO and cofounder of Pindrop. The “secret” answers and words used to protect bank and other accounts are often easily compromised, particularly using data gleaned online, or through tactics like phishing. Spoofing a caller ID to match a victim’s number when calling their bank has also become commonplace, says Balasubramaniyan. . . .

Pindrop’s software has been trained to extract specific information from the line noise on a call. It can even estimate a caller’s location, thanks to the patchwork of different telecommunications equipment that links up the globe. “The telephone network has been around for a long time, so there are very different fingerprints for different regions,” says Mustaque Ahamad, a professor at Georgia Institute of Technology and chief scientist and cofounder of Pindrop.

Very interesting.