Addressing the needs of government and law enforcement agencies with surveillance of voice communication

Providing lawful interception is a challenge for communication service providers to meet mandatory legal compliances. Compliance with transnational communication, service interruption, and private network complexity are the key barriers to provide required services.

The Problem
With the introduction of IP, the private communication between enterprises, and IP communication between communication service providers result in complexities when complying with government regulations for call interception. Any call interception may cause service interruption, and additional IP equipment in the network may jeopardize the security and integrity of such communication systems.

The Picture
Using state-of-the-art hardware and packet filtering techniques, the call is not hampered in any way when intercepted at the SN10K sub-system in the service provider network.
The Solution
  • Patton’s Signaling Gateway for lawful interception offers to intercept communication from SS7, SIGTRAN, ISDN PRI, CAS R2, T1 CAS and SIP; and can convert from any protocol to any other standards even when the interception is ON.
  • The intercepted communication channel is streamed over ISDN connection in the device. SmartMedia SN10K devices empower service providers to switch, control and manage lawful interception services from a well-defined interface with additional options exposed through ruby scripting in the gateway.
  • SN10K is already compliant to most of the federal regulations making it an affordable solution as compared to any competing products which require additional equipment and complicated setups.
  • SN10K comes with inbuilt ETSI 201 671 v2-1-1 compliant lawful interception capabilities and can also record voice for non-ETSI compliant networks.
  • The solution can interwork in GSM, UMTS, CDMA, satellite, 2G, 3G and 4G/LTE networks. It can connect to Class 4, IP Tandem, central office switching, IP Trunking and Class 5 deployments.
  • The end users do not notice any interruption during call interception. The service provider can efficiently manage the solution at any time of the day based on federal requests.
The Details
IP Network is the backbone of any modern voice communication network and the explosion of the enterprise to enterprise communication conflict with the federal and state compliances of lawful interception. The transnational communication, service interruption to introduce any surveillance system and the evolving private network communication add complexity to such interception. So, providing lawful interception is becoming a challenge for communication service providers to meet the federal and state mandatory legal compliances. Patton’s lawful interception solution is deployed at the core of the service provider network where it can tap into communication from cell-towers, base service centres, class /5 switches and can perform full-duplex monitoring. It can filter out various signalling protocols such as SS7/ISDN/SIP, HDLC frames and raw traffic from the network interfaces (E1/T1/J1/DS3/STM-1). The packet capturing is streamed at the line speeds resulting in no packet loss. The packet capture is performed at the hardware level on a dedicated unit, and hence it does not overload the existing network sub-systems with software or hardware patches. Being a dedicated intercept point, it does not act like a hardware probe which may introduce latency and compromise performance. The hardware processors selectively intercept relevant packets and record it. It collects both the signalling and the media information of the call. The media (ISDN both ways) and signalling (FTP/SFTP) information is handed over standard interface compliant with ETSI 201 671 v2-1-1. The data can then be further stored and processed.