Addressing Spam at the Systems-level through a Peered Overlay Network-Based Approach

Abstract

Reducing email spam has been an active industry and academic research domain for a number of years. Despite this, spam has remained an on-going world-wide problem which absorbs significant network resources in its delivery. Client-side solutions have addressed much of the end-user nuisance factor, but trace-back solutions have not succeeded in sufficiently reducing spam ingress at its source due to both the movement towards distributed spam generation and geopolitical factors. At a systems-level, part of the inherent issue in addressing global spam is the current divergence between responsibility and accountability; end-users’ are made responsible for addressing issues which the originating ISP’ s are better positioned to solve. Within this work, an overlay network-based approach is developed, which employs peer-to-peer QoS agreements in conjunction with a non-repudiation protocol for broadcast environments, to affect a low-spam overlay network. This of course does not solve the global spam issue, but does allow participating communities to move to a low-spam environment provided they are willing to accept their agreed to responsibilities.