Microsoft Researching Anti-Spam Technique 660
Tim C writes "Microsoft's Research group are working on a technique to combat spam. Dubbed the 'Penny Black project', it involves making email senders perform a computation taking around 10 seconds, which their recipients can then check for. This delay would limit bulk emailing speeds to around 8000 a day, meaning that to spam all of those 'fresh, guaranteed 25 million addresses' would take approximately 8.5 years." We've reported on this before.
Question... (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh yeah they invented this... (Score:5, Insightful)
So while MSFT didn't invent the original HashCash concept MSFT did improve upon it. So before anyone gets the bright idea of flaming MSFT ignorantly.... know your facts!
Tom
Adding to the 'Microsoft Minute' (Score:0, Insightful)
not a solution (Score:2, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Question... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:not a solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Whine!
It may not be the end all be all solution, but obviously we haven't found that yet. This seems like a pretty good solution for the moment. There may be a better one that comes out, making this one null and void, but we are continuing to find ideas which are a little better than the last.
How can that be a bad thing?
Re:Question... (Score:2, Insightful)
What concerns me is how this would affect people who use Eudora, or yahoo-mail, or any of the host of other systems that don't require the Lords of Redmond holding their hands to send e-mail.
It seems that it would be a stop-gap measure for anyone using MS products or services to spam, but unless it was adopted by every major (and many minor) e-mail services, it would have very little actual effect.
Kierthos
10 seconds (Score:0, Insightful)
Spammers don't use their own computers (Score:5, Insightful)
So 8,000 emails / day is fine, if you have a couple thousands relays to pick from.
Re:not a solution (Score:3, Insightful)
Some of your bandwidth and time is being wasted in the short term, because spam is still being circulated.
But in the long term, spam ceases to be an effective business model.
This not only isn't going to work, it's a disaster (Score:5, Insightful)
SMTP needs to be redesigned. Not by Microsoft, who will use any change in the protocol to tighten their monopoly grip, locking in their customers (and locking out the non-Microsoft world), but by the IETF.
Spammers having to do a computation before delivering email isn't going to limit them to 8000 pieces of mail a day, it simply means they're going to cluster all of those Windoze boxes their custom worms have infected, and let those millions of PCs do the work for them in parallel. SPAM won't decrease one bit, but the load and toll it places on those who use the net will go up significantly.
The solution isn't to increase the cost of email (computationally, bandwidth-wise, or financial), the solution is to repair the design flaws in SMTP (and, for that matter, USENET, something that remains the most useful medium on the 'net despite its widespread abuse) that make SPAM a viable methodology.
Stupid solution (Score:0, Insightful)
We could start by adding sender e-mail address verification to smtp - the recipient looks up the e-mail address's MX record, and asks if that specific e-mail was sent from that mail server. If not, it's probably spam.
The more server that implement this scheme, the more points will be given to those e-mails (by spamassassin etc.) that do not have this sender verification set up. Within a year or two, all serious mail providers, companies etc. will have sender address verification.
Combined with law enforcement, blacklists etc., this can become extremely effective.
Dybdahl
Okay.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, my whole take on spam is that everything needs to be done on the user end. Laws have loopholes in every situation (foreign spammers being a large one,) server restrictions are either too restrictive on small servers, or can be defeated with distributed computing.. I say we stick with Bayesian filtering. It works _wonders_ for me, and I'd love to see more people use it.
Re:not a solution (Score:3, Insightful)
Let me be clear about one thing... (Score:1, Insightful)
I seriously don't think this will work as (a) spammer won't use Microsoft products to send their wares or (b) because they will find a way to crack the security of this system (I mean, come on, this is Microsoft we are talking about here!).
Re:not a solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Oh yeah they invented this... (Score:3, Insightful)
The real contribution MSFT made was their memory-bound HashCash which was designed to perform comparably on the latest machines [e.g. P4-3000] and the oldest machines [e.g. P2-233].
And this is part about sales but the research is freely available off the web as well as part of the Crypto'03 proceedings.
Tom
what's your point? (Score:4, Insightful)
If Penny Black is all there is, it doesn't look like that's going to change. It will probably be decades before we know whether MSR will have had lasting impact. By that time, Microsoft will probably be a benign, lumbering giant, just like its monopolistic predecessors, AT&T and IBM.
Re:not a solution (Score:3, Insightful)
Recall that verification is trivial while generation is what takes the time.
Or the server could put the burden on the users.
The idea is not to stop spam it's to make it easier to filter out. Spammers won't take a 10,000x fold penalty increase to spam with valid tags...
Tom
Uhm (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not an anti-spamming technique (Score:1, Insightful)
Can Multiple Email Processes be Spawned ... (Score:1, Insightful)
I was just wondering (and I hate to play the Devil's Advocate but ....) what it would take to spawn multiple independent processes on one computer each running its own email client ... I know something like this should be easy with *nix ...
The nub of using memory is that it is question of "time." You can't fit "generated time" serially as the day is only 24 hours, but you can fit the "generated time" by putting it in parallel to fit within 24 hours with multiple processes ... and the parallel processes ONLY have to run the lightweight email client and nothing much else.
Limiting technology? (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead, they should focus on adding more functionality to the smtp protocol. For instance, they could add sender e-mail address verification. You can't check the actual e-mail address, but you can make a "dial-back" TCP connection to check, if the e-mail is known by the mail-server that belongs to the sender e-mail address.
Combined with law enforcement, blacklists etc., this is extremely effective.
Mailing list operators do use their own computers (Score:4, Insightful)
So this would have the effect of making legitimate high-volume, high-subscribership mailing lists expensive to operate (unless subscribers configured their MTAs to accept "unstamped" messages from the list, which is annoying and error-prone -- and has an obvious "workaround" for the spammers).
<tinfoilhat mode="on">Ha! Now we see Microsoft's *real* goal... to slow Linux development by shutting down the kernel mailing list!</tinfoilhat>
Seriously, though, any attempt to make e-mail expensive hampers those who have a legitimate need to send lots of e-mail.
Plus, there are obvious workarounds that will be developed in short order. A hardware stamp-generator could probably cut the stamp generation time to practically nothing, particularly since their approach somehow depends on memory/CPU latencies rather than processing time. You might be able to make a much faster stamp generator by running it on your graphics card, and custom-built hardware could certainly do it.
Re:Oh yeah they invented this... (Score:2, Insightful)
There's are plenty of math problems where thinking up the question, and checking the answer take little resources, but calculating the answer takes lots of resources. You can't "fake" the calculation.
Increasing the computing power you throw at the question clearly does mean you can send more eMails per hour. But at a cost. And giving a large increase in dollar cost for bulk emailers is exactly the point of this method.
Re:Can Multiple Email Processes be Spawned ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Scrap SMTP? (Score:3, Insightful)
Until you know how you're going to repair the problem, let's not get too excited about scrapping a protocol that still has a lot of flexibility. I've learned a lot about SMTP in the last few months, if there was universal agreeement as to WHAT to do, we could probably accomplish it in place.
What are the options? Whitelists, blacklists, red lists, gray lists, hash cash, filters, etc. No one can agree HOW to combat the problem. A new protocol would accomplish nothing without a planned solution that makes palpable the limitations of SMTP. Til then, let's not get hasty about blowing it off.
Textbook case of over-engineering (Score:3, Insightful)
This MS solution is almost a caricature of one of my own over-done home improvement ideas. Why bother with some elaborate cryptographic system to delay inbound emails? Why not just have the receiving SMTP process call sleep(10) at the beginning of the SMTP session? You get the same desired slowdown, and all you have to change is the SMTP server software. There's no need to modify MTAs, promulgate new standards, or fit yourself more tightly into the MS monopoly noose.
What they fail to mention... (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps, if Steve 'Uncle Fester' Ballmer and his cronies had paid more attention to basic security to begin with, or had taken the trouble to actually try and educate their customers about the most basic computing security steps, there wouldn't be such a huge problem now.
This 'Penny Black' nonsense looks like nothing more than a means for them to make money off a mess that they created in the first place.
duh? (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, because they did not hear of parallel processing yet
Combining this with Distributed Computing (Score:2, Insightful)
But I think microsoft is intending to create a complete new business model for e-mail providers (and ofcourse for microsoft's hotmail.com) by selling the computing power to companies who need it.
What about legitimate bulk mailers? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Question... (Score:4, Insightful)
If this is so computationally expensive, what would happen to the mailserver if I sent...oh half a million emails with bad keys in them.
Re:what's your point? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's patronizing. MSR doesn't have just one journal publication to their credit, they have had a sustained output of quality publications over years. There shouldn't be any question in anybody's mind whether MSR is an innovative and high-quality research lab: it clearly is. They are among the top-rated research labs in computer science, both in general and in specific areas.
I was hoping to FP to dispel the people who are naturally going to post out how MSFT is not innovative.
What you are missing is that whether MSR publishes nice papers or not has nothing to do with whether Microsoft "is innovative", i.e., whether the company produces innovative products. MSR is innovative, but Microsoft products are not. That disconnect is common among large companies and their research labs.
You seem to be agreeing with me while arguing against my post!!!
You are engaging in the usual confusion between research labs and corporate products. The only thing I can't tell is whether it's out of ignorance or whether you are doing it deliberately (PR departments often like to use releases about interesting research results to cover up inadequacies in a company's product line).
Re:not a solution (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it isn't. Three years ago it might have been a solution, but right now, it's just a colossal waste of time.
The problem with this is that it operates on the assumtion that spammers work within the same boundaries as everyone else. Anyone who has spent even a tiny fraction of their time fighting spam knows this is simply not true.
The days of spammers sending spam from a single server are long gone - nowadays, they use thousands of trojaned machines to do their work. How many machines do spammers control? Enough to launch effective DDoS'es on some of the largest pipes out there.
The effectiveness of this 'solution' would be marginal at best.
Now compare the effect it would have on legitimate users - an individual sending mail wouldn't notice 10 seconds.. but email is not only used by individuals.
Something to keep in mind when assessing any anti-spam 'solution' such as this is the following:
From a receiver's standpoint, the only difference between a legitimate mailing list and a spammer is that the user asked to be part of a mailing list.
Now think about how this would affect legitimate mailing lists: How many mail servers do most mailing lists have? One? Two? Six? Some large mailing lists might have a dozen.
So how does this affect those mailing lists?
It would shut them down, is how. They would cease to be useful, as it would take days for their mails to get through.
So the 'obvious' solution to this problem would be to whitelist legitimate mailing lists, right? Wrong. That's not a solution either (and we'll ignore the point that any 'solution' that requires exceptions is probably not very well thought out.)
I maintian a mail server for a few thousand people. I have no idea which mailing lists they would subscribe to. It would probably become a full-time job to keep such a whitelist up to date. (And most users wouldn't have any idea to notify me in the first place - so the end effect is that they would subscribe, and then bitch about how they're not getting the stuff they signed up for.)
This 'solution' does not solve anything, and will create more and worse problems than it attempts to solve.
Email Fiefdoms (Score:3, Insightful)
Having read the article, I was impressed by how clever their proposed solution was, though since I don't have a CS background, I don't understand how a mathematical computation can be essentially bottlenecked by memory latency -- I'd love it if someone could give an explanation of how that works.I'm guessing that some cryptographic hash needs to be held in memory, such that the nature of the data structure and physical access to it proves a bottleneck. This is probably way off.
But having read the /. comments, it becomes clearer to me that this solution, and many other proposed solutions face problems insofar as they "break" the assumed contract under which email has worked for so many years. To me, this seems to boil down to a challenge / response system (allbeit one that increases the overhead of the transaction signifigantly). The problem with these systems is that for a time, email will be broken for certain people, or broken when trying to communicate with certain people depending on whether or not one has migrated to the proposed system. I'd worry that this would have the effect of segmenting email users into little fiefdoms determined by which email system they are using.
I don't think a migration can happen unless there is some "benevolent dictator" who can force everyone to migrate to such-and-such a new email model and system, and frankly, I wouldn't want that forced on us.
It seems that the challenge to any such spam-reduction system is that migration must be immediate and non-backwards-compatible, and universal, otherwise for a time email users will be segmented into little fiefdoms based on whether they've migrated, and solution to which they've migrated.
Re:not a solution (Score:5, Insightful)
The idea is not to save you fifty-seconds of time by deleting your spam. That's a fringe benefit. The idea is to stop spam by making it harder and more expensive to do so. If we can up the price and difficulty to a certain point spam will no longer be a viable marketting technique.
You're missing no voodoo magic whatsoever, I think you've simply failed to think this through in its entirety. You claim you're sending 50 emails a day. In all likelihood most of these emails are not first-contact emails which would require a crypto challenge, but are in fact addressed to an established-contact which doesn't challenge you.
But for the sake of argument lets say all 50 of these emails are first contact. Dandy. Lets look at how this goes. You write the first letter, and proofread it, and click send. Your system does not immediately lock for ten seconds. Instead your message goes into your outgoing message queue. While you are writing and proofreading your next message the system is busily computing the hash for the previous message.
Let's suppose even further that you type uncommonly fast, require not proofreading, and get all 50 of the messages into your outbox. You take a deep breath, run to the bathroom or for a refill on your coffee, or whatever -- guess whats happening while you're afk?
Re:Proposed "Sender do Something" technique. (Score:5, Insightful)
> the scoring process. If the message scores more
> than 6/10 the server sends the sender an
> authentication message, asking to validate the
> email.
So you are one of those resposible for bomabarding me with those damn things.
> This would require spammers to manually
> intervene and waste tons of their time. if they
> forged the sender email...
They always do. My domain is a favorite.
>
> email...
Yes. Mine.
>
Isn't that what the spammers say? "If you don't want it, just delete it. What's the big deal?"
The big deal is that about a quarter of my email is bogus bounces and useless "confirmation" message from systems such as yours.
_NEVER_ _REPLY_ _TO_ _SPAM_
Re:Question... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yes, let's pace innovation by grandmas (Score:3, Insightful)
It's ironic that your complaint about worst-case users and grandmas is tied to mention of industry.
Anything that produces an end product for a userbase must adapt to suit the needs of that userbase at the time that the product is being produced. If the end user is so egregiously stupid that they can't even handle e-mail without someone holding their hand, then rather than evolving toward the next great technological advance, usability must be made the next branch for improvement.
Think about it in relation to industry once. If automakers had blazed trails toward the next great evolution in automobiles, we could have cars that run a 1/4 mile in 4 seconds at nearly 200mph. Oh wait! We do! They're called funny cars! And nobody except a particular niche knows how to use and maintain them, and they're exceptionally dangerous machines. They are not refined for the general public, they are not safe, and when something goes wrong, it's often disastrous. Neutered cars like Corvettes and, for a few adventurous souls, Vipers, are fed to the public as top-of-the-line even though they're not. They're safe, (relatively) easy to use, and, for the most part, attractive to the buying public because, even if they break down it's just an inconvenience, they don't generally erupt into a fireball the size of a small house.
The computer industry will continue to evolve in much the same way. Crippled, blighted, and weak but generally consumer friendly software will drive the marketplace. In the meantime, hobbyists (Vipers and backyard mechanics) and hardcore computer geeks (funny cars and track techs) will continue to use the cutting edge workhorses that are far less refined, but far more advanced.
solution (Score:3, Insightful)
I think in the long run only something more expensive will deter most spam, but will not succeed completely. Case in point is all the junk mail we still get in our real mailbox. Someone out there is paying for postage to send that crap, yet they still ship it to me so that I can place it in my trash can.
My simple solution (Score:3, Insightful)
http://gallery7.withsex.com/
All I do is block withsex.com with an expression filter and all spam that's afilitated with that site goes away. Spammers can't ofuscate an URL otherwise it won't work. The image linked from the same site is 28KB. If that spam was sent out to 25 million people and all of them looked at it once that cost the spammers 667GB of transfer. On a standard DSL line it would take about 6 months to transfer that. These companies need a dedicated host to allow them that kind of bandwidth. The company may have a number of domains for the site but spammers aren't going to be using random ones to advertise it like they use random from e-mail addresses. They also have to keep the domains functional or all that spam goes to waste.
Not many hosts would allow that kind of bandwidth transfer without charging up the nose for it. Which limits the number of hosts that spammers will use for images. 2004Hosting.org/.net is a big one for the cable filter and "banned CD." 530000x.net is also affiliated with those spams.
http
click-net and click-com are what spammers use to get paid. If you click on a spam link, most likely it goes through a common domain to log the referal to calculate how much the spammer gets paid. Block the referal site and all spam that uses that referer to get paid is gone.
For example
http://www.xswcde.biz/index.php?id=173&affid=56
342
Is a big e-bay spammer site. I block xswcde.biz with an expression filter and all e-bay spam from that company goes away.
It basically boils down to blocking the company and not the spammer. My spam count went from about a dozen a day to 1 or 2 and they also have obvious tells. If possible I also block the domain in the from address. Using a web-form cut down on spam quite a bit as well.
Ben
Re:10 seconds (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd love to see the Itanium 2 results. The entire program could fit in cache... Yes, the array size could be increased in size, but that would futrher penalize users of PDAs, which already suffer quite a bit.
The real question is whether this program is suffiently enough of a unique case that further advances in memory technology (short of the Itanium's rather expensive brute force solution) will not make this program obsolete.
Motives (Score:3, Insightful)
No, if it takes 10 seconds for a spammer with the latest dual Xeon CPU (or hacked into a superfast company computer), it will take several minutes for the average user, and hours for my mother on her old P200 (which is more than good enough for sending email), or days for myself on my 20MHz PDA.
Of course, this will incite people to buy new PC's, which comes with a new operating system, made by guess who?
Nah, I'm not cynical. It's probably worse.
Regards,
--
*Art
Re:Yes, let's pace innovation by grandmas (Score:3, Insightful)
E-mail list killer (Score:4, Insightful)
First, it would kill legitimate mailing lists. Imagine what the perl5-porters list or the Linux kernel list or any of the other high traffic mailing lists would have to do to keep operational. Large mailing lists already have problems with lag. This would just add to that.
Also, there does not seem to be anything that would stop them from doing these operations in background and just contact multiple sites while working on the problem. They would just multi-thread the mail spammer or just hijack more machines to use as their slaves.
This technique requires replacing every mail program out there to support the protocol. Of course, they will just make it a condition to connect to exchange. Might be a way of getting people away from having to talk to compromised Windows mail servers.
This is a bad solution for a big problem.
"Something must be done! This is something, therefore we must do it!"
M$ is the major cause of spam! (Score:2, Insightful)
This "spam filter" stuff when performed by M$ is an insult when it does little to address the problem which it has a contributed to.
---
Please stop discussing M$ fixes on
Re:Question... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Oh yeah they invented this... (Score:3, Insightful)
If something like this became popular I'd have to drop the mailing list as the hardware cost would be prohibitive (10 messages a day, 10,000 emails at 10 seconds an email doesn't scale when the machine is serving web pages too).
The LKML people would be stuffed... they'd need to invest in one of those expensive zero wait-state memory modules just to stay online.
Re:not a solution (Score:2, Insightful)
Why not? Because the issue isn't "How do I filter spam?" THe issue is "How do I stop spam from being created in the first place?"
This is actually one of the stupidest ideas I've heard in a while. Let's see...a) Doesn't stop spammers from sending e-mail in the first place
See above. Also, it wastes valuable time and resources to pursue the idea...b) Naive idea that "[...] a computational "price" of a 10-second levy would mean spammers would only be able to send about 8,000 messages a day, at most".[1]
c) Ends up delaying delivery of legitimate e-mail!
d) Useless unless supported by both e-mail clients and MTA's.
e) Will add yet more complexity, cost, administration, explanation and general headaches to an e-mail system that used to be frelling useful.
Remember, Spam is a social problem. Spammers are, by nature, criminals. Not just because spamming is illegal in many states, not just because spammers will literally break-into computer systems just to launch campaigns, but also because frequently the content of the spam itself is illegal.
Frankly, as with any crime, it's not likely it will ever go away. The best we can do is make it less profitable for the spammers. To accomplish that, we need to punish those who encourage spam, at the least socially.
If you know someone who's ever responded to an obvious spam, rail them for it! Publically humiliate them and explain how incredibly stupid and thoughtless they are. Shun them. Mock them. And most importantly, educate them.
[1] Does Mr. Wobbler really think a spammer is just one guy on one PC sending e-mail out all by his lonesome? What good does this sytem do when spammers launch massive parallel sessions, using not only multiple dedicated T-1 lines but literally hundreds upon hundreds of open relays and proxies? What the hell sort of name is "Mr. Wobbler"?!!!
Re:Motives (Score:4, Insightful)