"May I borrow Your Filter?" Exchanging Filters to Combat Spam in a Community

Garg, Anurag and Battiti, Roberto and Cascella, Roberto G. (2005) "May I borrow Your Filter?" Exchanging Filters to Combat Spam in a Community. UNSPECIFIED. (Unpublished)

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    Abstract

    Leveraging social networks in computer systems can be effective in dealing with a number of trust and security issues. Spam is one such issue where the "wisdom of crowds" can be harnessed by mining the collective knowledge of ordinary individuals. In this paper, we present a mechanism through which members of a virtual community can exchange information to combat spam. Previous attempts at collaborative spam filtering have concentrated on digest-based indexing techniques to share digests or fingerprints of emails that are known to be spam. We take a different approach and allow users to share their spam filters instead, thus dramatically reducing the amount of traffic generated in the network. The resultant diversity in the filters and cooperation in a community allows it to respond to spam in an autonomic fashion. As a test case for exchanging filters we use the popular SpamAssassin spam filtering software and show that exchanging spam filters provides an alternative method to improve spam filtering performance.

    Item Type: Departmental Technical Report
    Department or Research center: Information Engineering and Computer Science
    Subjects: Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA075 Electronic computers. Computer science
    Uncontrolled Keywords: Email filters, spam messages, collaborative recommendation systems, collaborativ networks, trust, autonomic communication.
    Report Number: DIT-05-089
    Repository staff approval on: 26 Jan 2006

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