The From header field indicates the logical identity of the initiator of the request, possibly the user's address-of-record. This may be different from the initiator of the dialog. Requests sent by the callee to the caller use the callee's address in the From header field.
Like the To header field, it contains a URI and optionally a display name, encapsulated in a {@link javax.sip.address.Address}. It is used by SIP elements to determine which processing rules to apply to a request (for example, automatic call rejection). As such, it is very important that the From URI not contain IP addresses or the FQDN of the host on which the UA is running, since these are not logical names.
The From header field allows for a display name. A UAC SHOULD use the display name "Anonymous", along with a syntactically correct, but otherwise meaningless URI (like sip:thisis@anonymous.invalid), if the identity of the client is to remain hidden.
Usually, the value that populates the From header field in requests generated by a particular UA is pre-provisioned by the user or by the administrators of the user's local domain. If a particular UA is used by multiple users, it might have switchable profiles that include a URI corresponding to the identity of the profiled user. Recipients of requests can authenticate the originator of a request in order to ascertain that they are who their From header field claims they are.
Two From header fields are equivalent if their URIs match, and their parameters match. Extension parameters in one header field, not present in the other are ignored for the purposes of comparison. This means that the display name and presence or absence of angle brackets do not affect matching.
- The "Tag" parameter - is used in the To and From header fields of SIP messages. It serves as a general mechanism to identify a dialog, which is the combination of the Call-ID along with two tags, one from each participant in the dialog. When a User Agent sends a request outside of a dialog, it contains a From tag only, providing "half" of the dialog ID. The dialog is completed from the response(s), each of which contributes the second half in the To header field. When a tag is generated by a User Agent for insertion into a request or response, it MUST be globally unique and cryptographically random with at least 32 bits of randomness. Besides the requirement for global uniqueness, the algorithm for generating a tag is implementation specific. Tags are helpful in fault tolerant systems, where a dialog is to be recovered on an alternate server after a failure. A UAS can select the tag in such a way that a backup can recognize a request as part of a dialog on the failed server, and therefore determine that it should attempt to recover the dialog and any other state associated with it.
For Example:
From: "Bob" sips:bob@biloxi.com ;tag=a48s
From: sip:+12125551212@phone2net.com;tag=887s
From: Anonymous sip:c8oqz84zk7z@privacy.org;tag=hyh8
@author BEA Systems, NIST
@version 1.2