SoK: Everyone Hates Robocalls: A Survey of Techniques against Telephone Spam

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### Rating (1--4):
+ 3: Weak Accept -- This paper may have flaws, but I would not argue against it at a major conference


### What did this paper do well?

+ Presenting a good survey on current anti phone robo-call techniques and corresponding pros/cons for each
+ Proposing a good set of criteria for evaluating anti phone spam techniques
+ Present a good strategy - combining techniques - for defeating robo-calls
+ Provided good reference tables about past researches, categorized into technique categories and evaluation criteria

### Where did this paper fall short?

+ "spam calls demand immediate attention" ?? I found it is not necessary correct
+ 2013 statistics may be old when it comes to cell phone market
+ Do not provide insights into how spammers collect and organize phone numbers (organizing phone numbers into clusters is an important step if spammers want to offer spam-as-service)
+ South Asian accents in live scams ?? That is bias and not universal. 
+ "Difficulty of working with audio streams" is not true in the case of voice mail since service providers have the capability to "translate" voicemail to text now.
+ "Difficulty of tracing spam calls" may not be entirely true since the US government agencies have been having that capability for decades
+ Caller reputation system may not work well because callers switch phone numbers all the times. Integrating with other systems and calculating scores may add more cost to the existing costly subscription rate.

### What did you learn from reading this paper?

+ While phone stack shifted from PSTN to TCP/IP, we still use the old Signaling System No. 7 (SS7) suite of protocols. That allows any phone to reach any other phone.
+ The current US law protect TSPs from being liable for servicing spam calls
+ Several great constraints when it comes to preventing robocalls.

### What questions do you have about the paper or the area?

+ How fast is the rate of voip adoption ?
+ What are the best apps for preventing robocall on smart phones?
+ Why the potential of smartphone apps was not considered?

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