Systemic Spam Responses - Essay Example

?Q: What is the true loss and cost of spam? Why have systemic spam responses not been adopted? Argue for how would spam have to cost and to whom to end it. How would this change the infrastructure? How has spam already changed the infrastructure? With the advancement of technology an the internet being used for a multitude of purposes we can see how important a role the internet plays in the lives of individuals as well as corporations by viewing the estimate of about 50 billion messages being sent per day by the current volume of emails sent worldwide. However with all its advantages research suggests that of all the email that is sent daily 85% of these messages are unwanted spam, viruses, denial-of-service attacks, Trojans and other malicious threats. This misuse of the advantages, convenience and cost-effective measures that the internet facilitates for users all over the world which has resulted in a combined consensus from analysts throughout the world to come up with measures appropriate to restrict the free access of the email as well as web page facilities. These measures although controversial and undefined currently in their basic emphasis and in all certainty aim to reduce free access, ease of use, timeliness and the completely cost effective advantages that attract such a high level of abuse to the facility. This in itself is a true loss with legitimate users caught in the cross fire and being on the receiving end of all the barriers that are proposed to the easy usage of email and web access. The core problem with spam is that it bears the senders almost no cost to send the spam. The network service providers and the recipients bear the cost. Hence the cost associated with spam weighs down on the receivers in terms of reduced convenience and higher cost resulting from the proposed proof of work that aims to alter the economics of spam, by requiring that the send commit to a per-email cost. There are many reasons why a systemic spam response has not been adopted. This is mainly because the proposed responses lack in suitable aspects and hence cannot be generally adopted as a counter for the issue at hand. This issue being largely the enabling factor that spam is cheap to send. The most original and highly examined model to deter spam is the proof-of-word model. This comprises a set of proposals, in which email senders would be required to pay money, perform a resource-intensive computation, perform a series of memory operations, or post a bond for each message sent. The working assumption of this model was to deter spam by making it uneconomic to send a large number of messages, while enabling legitimate users to send small number of messages. Hence proof of work reverses the cost model of email by charging the sender instead of the user. All these components of the proof of work model seem promising however a uniform POW mechanism will not. Firstly because if it is expensive enough to stop spammers it must be so expensive that it will also stop legitimate users. Infact, the cost to a spammer would have to be a magnitude higher than the cost to a legitimate user because spammers face very different production costs due to spambots. The model does not accommodate these variable magnitudes. Second it is proposed that POW might work if it is combined with anti spam efforts such as reputation systems and per-email spam identification mechanisms. However criticism of this approach is based on the fact that these efforts suffer from penalizing new IP addresses and discarding incorrectly identified email which is a type of effort difficult to balance and will result in either new entrants being not allowed to send email, or each ne IP address will be allowed to send enough email that spam remains profitable. Changes to the current infrastructure are necessary to counter spam. It is suggested in various researches that unsolicited bulk email is such a problem on the internet mainly because the current economic framework and the basic infrastructure for email handling does little to discourage it. It is also somewhat proposed that if the infrastructure incorporated the some element of making senders pay for their messages spammers would cease their indiscriminate distribution of messages and email volumes would reduce as the senders would have to target more carefully or give up altogether. However this proposed change to the current infrastructure has been highly unpopular so the flaws of the current system still prevail. Dwork and Naor in 1992 propose an alternative change to the infrastructure by having a sender of an email perform a complex computation as evidence that they believe an email is worth receiving, only then will the email be sent. The focus element here is that the processing time will be free which will reduce the burden upon legitimate senders and affect only the spammers. Some traces of this suggestion can already by observed hence indicating a somewhat shift from the original infrastructure. Also another observable change can be seen in the way proof of work puzzles have not been restricted simply to email but also have been proposed for metering visiting to websites, providing a shift in incentives in peer to peer systems, mitigating distributed denial of service attacks and rate limiting TCP connections. All these aim to limit the abilities of the spammers but constitute to a noticeable shift in the infrastructure as well. Shifts in the economic infrastructure can also been viewed as Goodman and Routhwaite’s pricing survey, spammers used to charge as much as 0.1 cents per email but with the deployment of a proof of work system it would become necessary to restrict the spammer to 1750 emails per day hence changing the calculation time to at least 50 seconds. Also if we observe the impact of the proposed CPU approach prevalent changes would include preventing legitimate activity by 0.13% to 1.56%. Mostly affected would be the operating mailing lists however eBusinesses systems will also suffer. Read More