ISATS: Leveraging Identity Based Sender Authentication and Trust for Spam Mitigation
Details
| Supervisor: | Sufian Hameed |
| Duration: | 6 months |
| Type: | Bachelor Thesis |
| Status: | In progress (Tobias Kloht) |
Description
The explosive growth in the unsolicited email (spam) in the past decade has made it impossible for email communications to function without spam protection/filtering. Currently, spam emails have largely outnumbered legitimate ones, increasing from 65% in 2005 to 89% (262 billion spam messages daily) in 2010. Despite that researchers and practitioners have developed and deployed a broad variety of systems intended to prevent spam; it remains a pressing problem of large scale. The spam protection systems used today only filter spam from the user’s inbox (i.e. recipient’s edge), but the spam already travels the network, and provokes non-negligible cost to network operators in terms of bandwidth and infrastructure. On the other hand, content-based filtering, one of the most widely adopted defense mechanism, has turned spam problem into false positive and negative one. In consequence, this makes email delivery unreliable.
In iSATS we will leverage the Identity of the email sender to authenticate the source. Further we will maintain a Trust Infrastructure to verify the legitimacy of email along with the sender. Following are the design requirements of iSATS.
- Bind sender‘s identity to the domains, making the misbehaving sender visible.
- Mail Server (MS) take ownership of the messages they transmit (sender authentication).
- Each email user on the MS are assigned Trust Ratings (TR) to differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate users.
- MS at the receiver maintains local reputation of the sending MS.
- iSATS remains transparent to end users and operated at the SMTP time.
Required Skills
- High motivation and ability to work independently and capability to learn quickly new concepts.
- Basic understanding of computer networking
- Good programming skills