Let Your CyberAlter Ego Share Information and Manage Spam

Almost all of us have multiple cyberspace identities, and these {\em cyber}alter egos are networked together to form a vast cyberspace social network. This network is distinct from the world-wide-web (WWW), which is being queried and mined to the tune of billions of dollars everyday, and until recently, has gone largely unexplored. Empirically, the cyberspace social networks have been found to possess many of the same complex features that characterize its real counterparts, including scale-free degree distributions, low diameter, and extensive connectivity. We show that these topological features make the latent networks particularly suitable for explorations and management via local-only messaging protocols. {\em Cyber}alter egos can communicate via their direct links (i.e., using only their own address books) and set up a highly decentralized and scalable message passing network that can allow large-scale sharing of information and data. As one particular example of such collaborative systems, we provide a design of a spam filtering system, and our large-scale simulations show that the system achieves a spam detection rate close to 100%, while the false positive rate is kept around zero. This system has several advantages over other recent proposals (i) It uses an already existing network, created by the same social dynamics that govern our daily lives, and no dedicated peer-to-peer (P2P) systems or centralized server-based systems need be constructed; (ii) It utilizes a percolation search algorithm that makes the query-generated traffic scalable; (iii) The network has a built in trust system (just as in social networks) that can be used to thwart malicious attacks; iv) It can be implemented right now as a plugin to popular email programs, such as MS Outlook, Eudora, and Sendmail.Comment: 13 pages, 10 figure

Minimizing the Time of Spam Mail Detection by Relocating Filtering System to the Sender Mail Server

Unsolicited Bulk Emails (also known as Spam) are undesirable emails sent to massive number of users. Spam emails consume the network resources and cause lots of security uncertainties. As we studied, the location where the spam filter operates in is an important parameter to preserve network resources. Although there are many different methods to block spam emails, most of program developers only intend to block spam emails from being delivered to their clients. In this paper, we will introduce a new and efficient approach to prevent spam emails from being transferred. The result shows that if we focus on developing a filtering method for spams emails in the sender mail server rather than the receiver mail server, we can detect the spam emails in the shortest time consequently to avoid wasting network resources.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figure