Fighting spam using social GateKeepers
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Fighting spam using social GateKeepers Sufian Hameed1 (), Xiaoming Fu1, Nishanth Sastry2, Pan Hui3 1. Institute of Computer Science, University of Göttingen, Goldschmidtstr. 7, Goettingen, 37077 Germany 2. Institute of Telecommunications, King’s College London, Strand, London, WC2R2LS, UK 3. Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, Ernst-Reuter-Platz 7, 10587 Berlin, Germany
Received: 25 September 2012/Revised: 6 December 2012/Accepted: 9 February 2013 © Tsinghua University Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013
Abstract We introduce LENS (LEveraging social Networking and trust to prevent Spam transmission), a novel spam protection system which leverages the recipient’s social network to allow correspondence within the social network to directly pass to the mailbox of the recipient. To enable new senders to send emails, legitimate and authentic users, called GateKeepers (GKs), are selected from outside the recipient’s social circle and within predefined social distances. Our evaluations show that LENS provides each recipient reliable email delivery from a large fraction (up to 55% of entire userbase) of the social network; it is also effective and lightweight in accepting all the legitimate inbound emails in the real email traces. LENS imposes zero overhead for the common case of frequent and familiar senders, and remains lightweight for the general case. Our prototype implementation of LENS in Postfix/MailAvenger shows that LENS consumes up to 75% less CPU and 9% less memory as traditional solutions like SpamAssassin. Keywords social networks, social trust, email social network, email communication, spam prevention
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Introduction
Spam emails have largely outnumbered legitimate ones, increasing from 65% [5] in 2005 to 89.1% (262 billion spam mails/day) in 2010 [2]. Spam is projected to cost $338 billion by 2013 [4]. The common state-of-the-art strategy used today only filters spam from the user’s inbox (i.e. recipient’s edge), but the spam already traverses the network, and provokes non-negligible cost to network operators in terms of bandwidth and infrastructure. On the other hand, content-based filtering has turned spam problem into false positives and false negatives. There have been innumerable attempts to mitigate spam, including recent solutions that exploit trust embedded in social networks [14,23]. RE: [14] suggests that recipients can trust senders in their immediate social neighborhood, and proposes a zero false-positive mechanism for vetting emails sent by their friends or friends of friends (FoF)1. However, emails coming from outside this circle still need to
be verified by unreliable spam filters. In contrast, Ostra [23] introduced a system of credits that allows anyone to send email to anyone else, as long as their balance of credits allows them to get a token. Unfortunately, for Ostra to be successful, the entire network would need to adopt the system. In LENS, we aim to create a system that, like RE:, can be deployed individually by small groups of users, but allows for a reach greater than FoF
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