Authenticating the Legitimacy of Gate Keeper nodes to vouch for Spam free communication outside social community

Details

Supervisor:	Sufian Hameed
Duration:	6 months
Type:	Master Thesis or Student Project
Status:	open

Description

The explosive growth in the unsolicited email (spam) in the past decade [1] has made it impossible for email communications to function without spam protection/filtering. Currently, spam emails have largely outnumbered legitimate ones, increasing from 65% [8] in 2005 to 81% (200 billion spam messages daily) in 2009 [2]. 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 [3, 4], 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 recent years several techniques [5, 6 and 7] have been presented using social networks to fight spam. Unfortunately their services are only limited within the social network of an email user. At Computer Netwoks groups, in collaboration with Deutsche Telekom labs, we are actively working on LENS, a new spam protection system, which leverages anti-social networking paradigm based on an underlying trust infrastructure to both extend spam protection beyond a user’s social circle and fundamentally prevent the transmission of spam across the network at the first place. . The key idea of this paradigm in LENS is to select email users called Gatekeepers (GKs), from outside the user’s social circle and within pre-defined social distances. Unless a GK vouches for the emails of potential senders from outside the social circle of a particular recipient, those e-mails are prevented from transmission.

The single most important question in the whole design is how to ensure that the GKs are non-malicious (and not spammers themselves). Obviously, we cannot simply assume they are non-malicious simply based on the fact that they are in the social network. Otherwise we can simply whitelist the whole social network.

The goal of this thesis is to design and implement a protocol for authenticating that the selected GKs (to vouch for spam free communication outside a user’s social circle) are legitimate and non-malicious GKs.

Required Skills

• High motivation and ability to work independently and capability to learn quickly new concepts.
• Basic understanding of computer networking
• Good programming skills