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Title

Mitigating email spam by statistical rejection of TCP connections using recent sender history

Author(s)

Tran, Minh H.;  Armitage, Grenville J.

Abstract

Email spam is a significant problem for ISPs and Internet users. While part of the solution is legislative, there remains many avenues for innovative technological spam mitigation techniques. We propose a novel TCP-layer algorithm that statistically accepts or rejects in-bound TCP connection requests based on the recent past history of spam injection from particular source IP addresses. Our scheme allows for the automatic rehabilitation of legitimate senders and cuts the operating cost of manually updated blacklists and whitelists. It also reduces the consequences of falsely categorising emails and reduces the last-hop network resource consumption caused by spammers. Our scheme sits transparently in front of the existing SMTP server, so it will supplement (rather than replace) existing spam-filters operating inside existing SMTP servers or at the end-user’s mail client.

Publication type

Conference paper

Research centre

Swinburne University of Technology. Faculty of Information and Communication Technologies. Centre for Advanced Internet Architectures

Source

Proceedings ATNAC 2006 : Australian Telecommunication Networks and Applications Conference, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 04-06 December 2006, p. 283-287

Publication year

2006

Keyword(s)

Spam;  Anti-spam;  Random rejection;  TCP drop/reset;  FreeBSD kernel;  ipfw;  Proxy server;  Mail server

Publisher

University of Melbourne

ISBN

0977586103

Publisher URL

http://www.ee.unimelb.edu.au/atnac2006/programs/day2.html

Copyright

Copyright © 2006 ATNAC Australia and the authors. Published version of this paper reproduced with the kind permission of the publisher.

Full text

Peer reviewed