Naval researchers pioneer TCP-based spam detection

The work "advanced both the science of spam fighting and ... worked through all the engineering challenges of getting these techniques built into the most popular open-source spam filter," said Massachusetts Institute of Innovation computer science technology affiliate Steve Bauer, who was not involved with the work. "So this is both a clever bit of technology and genuinely practical contribution to the persistent problem of fighting spam."

The paper that accompanied the presentation

In the paper that accompanied the presentation, the researchers showed that spam email blasts have certain characteristics at the networking transport layer. Signal analysis of factors just as timing, packet reordering, congestion and flow control can reveal the work of a spam-spewing botnet. "A lot of spam comes from spambots, which are sending as fast as they can and congesting their local uplink," Beverly said. "So you can detect them by looking actually hard at the TCP stream."

Thus far, before techniques developed for analyzing spam at the network transport layer have been offline, which is to say, the email traffic is analyzed as a batch, and the results can be used later. The naval researchers have developed an architecture for analyzing network traffic as it comes over the wire.

The ability to detect a spam message without to tell the truth examining the contents of the message would be handy in a number of situations, noted Bruce Davie, a Cisco fellow and visiting lecturer at MIT. Davie is familiar with even though not involved in the work. An Internet service provider could apply the detection algorithm without violating users' privacy. It can be used to detect messages that are encrypted, just as those traveling over an encrypted link. It can as well be used to detect other forms of malicious traffic, just as port scans from botnet hosts.

Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general research breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Joab on Twitter at @Joab_Jackson. Joab's e-mail address is Joab_Jackson@idg.com

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