Trusting Spam Reporters: a Reporter-Based Reputation System for Email Filtering
Trusting Spam Reporters: A Reporter-based Reputation System for Email Filtering ELENA ZHELEVA University of Maryland, College Park ALEKSANDER KOLCZ Microsoft Live Labs LISE GETOOR University of Maryland, College Park Spam is a growing problem; it interferes with valid email and burdens both email users and service providers. In this work, we propose a reactive spam-filtering system based on reporter reputation for use in conjunction with existing spam-filtering techniques. The system has a trust- maintenance component for users, based on their spam-reporting behavior. The challenge that we consider is that of maintaining a reliable system, not vulnerable to malicious users, that will provide early spam-campaign detection to reduce the costs incurred by users and systems. We report on the utility of a reputation system for spam filtering that makes use of the feedback of trustworthy users. We evaluate our proposed framework, using actual complaint feedback from a large population of users, and validate its spam-filtering performance on a collection of real email traffic over several weeks. To test the broader implication of the system, we create a model of the behavior of malicious reporters, and we simulate the system under various assumptions using a synthetic dataset. Categories and Subject Descriptors: H.1 [Information Systems]: Models and Principles General Terms: Algorithms Additional Key Words and Phrases: spam filtering; reputation systems; trust. Author’s address: E. Zheleva, Computer Science Department, AV Williams Bldg., University of Maryland, College Park, MD, 20742. c ACM, 2009. This is the author’s version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use.
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