Parlay

Parlay Group formed (1998, ended ~2007) to specify and promote open APIs that “intimately link IT applications with the capabilities of the communications world”.

Goal: to allow applications to access the functionality of the telecommunication network in a secure way.

Parlay APIs:

Service interfaces - provide access to network capabilities and information
Framework interfaces provide the underlying supporting necessary for the service interfaces to be secure and manageable.

The APIs are defined in Universal Modeling Language (UML). For further info see [Almkvist and Wahren 2002] and 3GPP’s Open Services Architecture.

Slide Notes

Magnus Almkvist and Marcus Wahren, “Preserving Integrity in Telecommunication Networks opened by the Parlay Service Interface”, M.S. Thesis, Dept. of Microelectronics and Information Technology, Royal Institute of Technology, Sept. 2002 http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-93210 Links to an external site.

Transcript

[slide336] There's a system called Parlay. And Parlay basically gives you a means that you can give an external party to the operator the ability to actually control part of the services inside the telecom operator's network. So, for instance, a Parlay entity could get to control a particular block of phone numbers, and therefore they could send messages into the operator, suitably authenticated, saying, port this number from here to here, or redirect calls to that number, to this particular phone, etc. This is really an interesting area because it really is the one place where the telecom operators opened up their network a little bit. So they actually made a Parlay service provider kit that you could get, and you would get it with a PKI, so you had a public-private key, you could set up a trust relationship with them, and they would let you do various things.