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Impoverish a Spammer Today
esj at harvee writes "Recently the Camram project released its latest version of a hybrid sender-pays anti-spam system. The project has proven that sender-pays works and has demonstrated how to make it work with existing e-mail systems. Camram has developed hybrid sender-pays techniques that scale down to the desktop and up to the enterprise. It's a completely decentralized system that can put spam-fighting power in the hands of individuals. It gives you control of not only the current generation of spam, but also any future commercial spam -- why replace Viagra ads from a scam artist with Viagra ads from Pfizer?"
The problem is that I've seen no good way to stop non spammers from paying as well.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
This could really change the way e-mail is distributed.
Craig Steffen
http://www.craigsteffen.net
What happens when your box has just been highjacked by the latest MS exploit and used as a Spam server/relay.
"We all know that Crap is King" - Don Henley
Or maybe businesses should find a new way to communicate internally?
they should be able to survive just fine according to the SPAM nutrition fact sheet
why replace Viagra ads from a scam artist with Viagra ads from Pfizer?
Because I only trust my penis to professionals.
RTFA, it handles mailing lists fine. You whitelist the sender and then they don't need to stamp the mail.
The technology is a hybrid solution to avoid the problem of universal adoption... a nice side-effect of this is you don't demand stamps from your white-list.
I have to say, I think it's quite an interesting combination of concepts, but still requires mass adoption to be useful.
It is just bush and the other idiots who signed the federal law, killed it and made it a recipient suffers system.
Fight Spammers!
They have a page with Frequently Raised Objections. Now I've made redundant 40% of the remaining posts to this article.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Why is this a problem? If what you are expected to pay depends on volume then it means that a non-spammer who only sends a few emails a day will have almost nothing to pay while a spammer will be unable to afford the work required to send thousands of emails. Since this is based upon proof of work and not an actual monetary amount, it will not be a cost that is difficult to bear.
Yes, some people who run email lists out of their account will be inconvenienced, but not as much as they claim. They will just need to change the signup message to say "this is a mailing list that you signed up for, so add us to your whitelist because we will not be performing proof of work challenges and will drop you from the list when the first proof of work request arrives."
Some will claim that the hordes of spam zombies out there will be able to do the work on the spammer's behalf so this is not a solution, but it will at least provide some rate limiting for that zombie and it will also make it much more likely that the zombie will be noticed by the user when it starts to chew up CPU cycles.
I agree, but this project isn't exactly e-postage... it's more like E-e-postage... you pay in computational cycles, not dollars (or pounds or lira or whatever you trade in your part of the world).
So as long as you're not sending out several thousand messages to new and different recepients on a daily basis, you needn't really worry.
Camram FRO (Frequently Raised Objections)
A system such as sender-pays, which proposes a radical change in the email environment, inevitably generates objections. This is positive because it helps identify the strengths and weaknesses of the system. However, once objections have been worked through and the developers have answered the same questions approximately 10^20 times, a listing of Frequently Raised Objections is appropriate.
Isn't universal adoption necessary for a sender-pays system?
For a classic sender-pays system, the answer is yes--any system requiring universal adoption is a non-starter.
Because of this problem, the Camram project (and probably others) expanded the classic sender-pays model to a hybrid sender-pays model. One of the many strong features of the hybrid model for sender-pays is that it solves the problem of universal adoption. This new model provides anti-spam benefits to the very first user, and the benefits increase as you add users. Hybrid sender-pays lets you incrementally introduce an anti-spam device that will take a serious chunk out of the economic foundations of spam.
What kind of attacks are possible against a hybrid sender-pays system?
There are four known attacks on this system. Two of them attack the sender-pays system, one attacks the friend filter (i.e. the white list), and the last attacks the content filter. Content filter attacks are nothing new; we are in the middle of one right now where spammers are trying to bypass Bayesian filters. As the number of stamps increase, the "harshness" of the content filter can increase and eventually the need for content-filtering can go away.
The friend-filter attack comes from the implementation of white lists by name. If you know the content of the white list, then a simple forgery will let you bypass the filters. The trick of course is determining the content of the white list. One longer-term solution is to move to white listing by public key. Unfortunately, as long as there are folks not using the system, there will always be a need for white-listing by name.
Attacks on the sender-pays system involve trying to generate stamps faster. The first is the classic hardware accelerator. The best estimate we have for today is a 500 times speed up over software. There are both hardware and software responses to this attack but both responses effectively devalue the stamp or the means of production, which in turn restores the economic balance. The second attack utilizes zombies as a compute array. But if you run the numbers, you'll find out that the number of zombies known, if run perfectly and full tilt, cannot generate enough stamps for all of the spam in the world today. A tremendous number of stamps would be generated, but not enough for everybody. One benefit of zombies being used to generate stamps is that the machines will become hot, slow, and probably unreliable, all of which will be noticeable to the end-user. With luck, this means some people will get their machines fixed and reduce the zombie issue. Again, if the zombies the start generating stamps, one can always change stamp definitions or value.
How do you deal with large-scale legitimate mail sources (i.e. mailing lists, mail houses, etc.)?
There are two issues here. Mailing lists don't really have a good solution with the first generation of stamps. The traffic mailing lists generate is fundamentally indistinguishable from spammers, therefore whatever hurts spammers will hurt mailing lists. The answer for right now is to not do anything with mailing lists. Let them send unstamped mail and let the user whitelist mailing lists or deal with the trapped message issue manually.
In the future, it will become easier to deal with mailing lists because of the second generation of stamps (opportunistic signatures). If the list is signed with its own stamps, then it would be let through without problem. Spammers would still be barred because their signatures would be ignored.
The second issue is
where is that big form listing why it will not?
Casual Games/Downloads
As long as people whitelist you there's no cost to you. You're fine.
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
You will have to change your signup mechanism to notify the user that they have to add you to the whitelist, and you will need to change the list admin email to first send a message to a user reminding them of this fact and only after they reply to this standard response to all complaints message will the message filter up to your mailbox. This is a couple of hours of coding for anyone maintaining a mailing list package.
READ THE PROPOSAL FIRST PLEASE!
This is not asking you to spend money, it is asking you to perform a proof of work. This is hashcash, not real money.
From Camran's FRO
One benefit of zombies being used to generate stamps is that the machines will become hot, slow, and probably unreliable, all of which will be noticeable to the end-user. With luck, this means some people will get their machines fixed and reduce the zombie issue.
You just have to love a product that has the potential to toast a clueless luser's computer. I would be more than happy to shell out good money for software that has "Makes PC's burst into flames" listed as one of the features. And this stuff is Free !
--LordPixie
On their site they address zombie machines. They claim that users of zombies would be more likely to notice the infection if it sucked up all their CPU and made their systems run hot...
I somehow doubt that.
But what I can't disagree with, is that getting the same amount of spam sent as they currently are, would take many (orders of magnitude) more zombies. They claim on their site that if you maxed out every known zombie you couldn't generate stamps fast enought to send spam at the current rates.
This could be a step in the right direction, but I am worried about many issues for a sender pays system.
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
I'm reading TFA and it states quite clearly "Mailing lists don't really have a good solution"
It seems to me that one should need only one stamp generator. I receive a payment request containing a message encrypted with a short private key, and as "postage" I need to decrypt the message and return it. As computers get faster, the key length used to encrypt the message gets longer. The receiver can thus decide how much postage is required.
This way the stamp generator doesn't need to have any secret component, and could be written in any language. It could be part of the mail client.
This is a calculation based stamp, not anything financial. It's not going to cost anything. It allows for white-listing on a per user basis that exempts senders from the stamp requirement. Therefore, if you wanted to get on a mailing list, you'd add them to your white-list. Yes, it's an extra step, but what's one extra step when you sign onto a mailing list compared to having to dig through hundreds of spam messages a day?
Have some (slightly out of date) documentation:
One section
Another section
Ripped right from their website's Frequently Raised Objections:
If anybody can generate a stamp, what is to stop a spammer from generating stamps?
Nothing. In fact, we want spammers to spend as much time as they can generating stamps because it will undermine their economic foundations. As a spammer generates messages with stamps, people can raise their postage based on the spam. Everyone's rates will increase and it'll only affect the spammer and stranger-to-stranger e-mail. Friend-to-friend e-mail doesn't use work stamps and will be unaffected by any postage increases. "
And....
The second attack utilizes zombies as a compute array. But if you run the numbers, you'll find out that the number of zombies known, if run perfectly and full tilt, cannot generate enough stamps for all of the spam in the world today. A tremendous number of stamps would be generated, but not enough for everybody. One benefit of zombies being used to generate stamps is that the machines will become hot, slow, and probably unreliable, all of which will be noticeable to the end-user. With luck, this means some people will get their machines fixed and reduce the zombie issue. Again, if the zombies the start generating stamps, one can always change stamp definitions or value.
[all emphasis theirs]
It's almost like they anticipated this sort of thing. Or, like, thought out their design beforehand. Crazy concept, no ?
--LordPixie
Require your users to whitelist your address, and then don't stamp your messages.
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
Did you even read the proposal? I ask because both your original post and your response the the first reply iindicate that you still have no idea how this works, even after someone has been kind enough to save you from your own laziness and point out this proposal is not talking about a montary transation.
So, for your benefit, here is the "proof of work for complete idiots" version:
-You send your spam. Each recipient asks you to perform a proof of work, a mathematical problem that requires some CPU cycles.
-Your CPU starts chugging away at the requests and eventually performs all of the required proof of work.
-Your system responds to the proof of work request and the message is delivered.
-Your spam to your users is delivered, but not instantly because several hours of CPU work were required.
-Cost to you: nothing except a bit of electricity to keep your CPU chugging.
What happens when a virus propagates that white lists the spammers? While every technology that rises for this problem will have some kind of solution, they will also have some kind of weakness.
Though, my hats off to whoever makes a overall good solution.
It isn't talking about money at all -- only computation. The only extra money you would spend is on your electric bill since your CPU load will be higher. Besides, you wouldn't need to stamp since you're on their whitelist. ;)
Like whitelists and keywords, this is a special case of a token-based system. Token-based systems depend on the sender performing some action that is, at the time they send it, sufficiently hard to predict, unusual, or onerous for a spammer to bother with it.
For example, I have certain addresses that bypass my spam filter either partially or completely, and I have set up a scheme for my kids whereby a sender has to know a "magic word" to get in. Whitelists, of course, make the sender address the token.
Right now, these are good enough.
Spammers are beginning to respond to whitelists, though, and trying to guess sender names. It's only a matter of time before they start using the address books in their zombies to build up lists of probable whitelists, and start sending spam using pairs of addresses from the same address book the way viruses already are.
Combining challenge/response with cpu stamps, java and other factors. It allows the problem to change over time, requires no new software at the sender's end (which is the big non-starter) and still allows anonymous mail.
It's at this page on cpu stamps and challenge response.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Yes, it states that, then states several solutions. I guess the developer doesn't consider whitelisting your mailing lists to be a good solution. I disagree, I think bulk mail is exactly the type of mail I don't mind whitelisting, while I would find it a major inconvenience to have to whitelist personal mail.
So the next spam zombie worm will just whitelist everyone?
I suspect the goal of a program like this really is not to stop spam. The goal would be to increase the marginal return from the spam that gets sent and for the network to grab a piece of the action.
When someone is paying you, it is extremely difficult to make judgments on quality of the mail. I've seen lots of email lists and newsletters start with good intentions then devolve into a garbage fountain.
In the end the pay to send networks will take money from anyone.
The real goal of such schemes is simply to increase the marginal returns from the spam. As the amount of spam sent to open email accounts reaches astronomical proportions, I can't help but think that the amount of cash the spammers get per email is dropping. I can't help but think that the end goal of pay for spam is that by throwing a rich third party into the equation, they will increase their return.
All the people running 200 MHz mail servers are only going to be able to send 10 legitimate emails per day and spammers will hijack more unpatched 3 GHz machines and do distributed computations and send out more spam than ever that gets through because it's passed the computation test.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
The first is semicorrect, but remember the system falls back to whitelisting and CRM114 if an email arrives without a stamp. You can always whitelist mailing lists even if you feel confident enough to turn off the CRM114.
Yes, but to perform a useful brute force attack, from the point of view of a spammer, you'd need to hijack more computers than exist on Earth. Again this goes back to the fall-back. This is a "only if both parties choose to play will they benefit, and if one chooses not to they lose nothing" scheme. So users of email will put up with it. No it doesn't. Again, players benefit, those who opt out lose nothing, they end up back with their sent emails screened by users with whitelists and CRM114, which is no different to the situation right now. Again... Doesn't require a centrally controlling authority. In fact, this is touted by the proposal's proponents as being one advantage it has over the stupid identity verification systems proposed by anti-spam zealots. This proposal has nothing to do with taxes. No money is sent. Look, it's quite simple. You have an email client that, on sending email to someone for the first time from a particular email addresses, generates a "stamp" which is computationally difficult to generate - ie it'll take some time. There's no money involved, except in that people wanting to send huge amounts of email may - may mind you, not will, depending on how they send the email - have to invest a few billion in Apple twin G5s. No, spammers can be as dishonest as they wish. They'll have to be unbelievably smart to get around this. What blacklists? It still will be. I think this is a remarkable idea, and is the first rational anti-spam system I've seen proposed for a while. It solves the false-positive problems inherent in AI filters like Bayesian and CRM114. It doesn't hurt innocent parties. It's interesting, I'd like to see more analysis but I think it actually has a chance of working.Which presumably means the anti-spam zealots will fight it with all they can muster...
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
If you *do* want email from a certain company, and you signed up for it, then you should add that domain/email to your white list. Simple as that.
I can think of no more annoying system than one that requires me to adjust some system every time I want an email confirmation from some company I am ordering from. What if you're at an art fair for example and fill out an email address on a card? I sure hope I remember to fill out that whitelist when i get home - if I even know where it's coming from!
What a way to twist the WWW and email into something unusable. Frankly I would far rather have what spam I do and filters than have to go somewhere every single time I need a new sender to be able to send to me.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Not all devices will have enough computing power available. My grandmother has an Amstrad E-mailer. How long will it take the 4Mhz Z80 in there to generate a stamp? How about the cpu in my phone?
From the Faq "You only generate a stamp the first time you mail someone." So when all 20 of the biggest spamhouses have generated a stamp for you, you are right back at square 1? Net cafes with changing clientelle pay a higher price than spammers? Forged headers cliaming to be from friends don't need a stamp?
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
I DEPEND on several email lists, and the only way sender pays is if it is universal, and that would bankrupt the lists I'm on, having an extremely deleterious net effect on the free speech that the email lists of these extremely niche interests provide.
I think we simply need to throw more money at Interpol, getthem a "Spam Cop Agency" and make the punishments *severe* enough for spammers that it will snuff these asshats out of existence.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
we had with the major ISPs going to block peoples email/port 25 whatever if they are found to be spam spewers, there won't be as much of a problem with zombies. Enoughs enough, we need to treat people on the net as human beings with opposable thumbs and at least some level of adult competence. A small fee to access the net is not a license to be a clueless dingbat hoser forever and ever and a day. Just block zombiefied machines until they are verified fixed. If I got nailed, so be it, I expect to be blocked until it's cleaned up. I have zero problems with that.
And like they are doing with the latest windows/explorer exploit du juor, see where the spammers/recipients are making their profit, in this latest case sending the hijacked data to some russian place, all the carriers block that domain from any traffic, as much as possible, from this end anyway.
Fighting SPAM is no one silver bullet, but the combination of the techniques would probably work well enough. I'd go even further, if there are nations, or more accurately at least large domains and subnets that just refuse to cooperate, blacklist them.
We need the sane, adult, polite and responsible internet, it makes no sense to let the nutjobs,the crooks and the clueless hijack the entire internet and spoil it for everyone else. And if it doesn't happen voluntariily with normal users all the way to various corporations all cooperating, then sure as crap various governments will step in and censor and restrict hell out of it. I don't think we really want that second option.
Maybe email servers should operate like a DNS server instead of as a spooling server, providing a route to the recipient rather than actually sending the mail itself. Let the spooling and sending happen upstream at the sender's location.
The sender takes the full bandwidth penalty of sending every copy of their email because even an "open relay" doesn't equate to infinite bandwidth the way it does now.
I just found out there's no such thing as the real world. It's just a lie you've got to rise above. - John Mayer
...and let's see if people like Bernard Shifman and Scott Richter can spam me with an Etch-n-Sketch.
The "stupid lusers" machines will become less usable with all that stamp generation going on. They will be more likely to notice they need help. They will also be more likely to become frustrated with the computer and stop using it (unfortunate but still reducing spam).
Bottom line: If anyone can send you a message without penalty or authorization there will be spam. You can't have it both ways.
I agree - worms are the biggest problem with this scheme. You can't hold the spammer accountable because the spammer is most likely not even sending the spam but using millions of zombie machines.
The best way to deal with the problem is follow the money then show up at 4am and stick a Glock in the face of the spammers and their family members. After they shit the bed give them the option to play nice or die anonymously. Harsh? Yes. But not quite as bad as prior reform methods such as the Pyramid of Skulls*. I may be biased, my computer system was compromised by trojans from those bastards last week and pretty much I am still pissed about it.
* Historical note on the making decortive yet functional pyramid of skulls (taken, I shit you not, from kids.mapzones.com): 1258 Baghdad was conquered and sacked by Hulagu, grandson of the great Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan. Hulagu killed all the scholars in Baghdad and erected a pyramid from their skulls. He destroyed the elaborate irrigation system that the Abbasids had established. Iraq became a neglected frontier area ruled from the Mongol capital of Tabriz in Iran. In 1335 the last great Mongol ruler of this region died, and anarchy prevailed. The Turkic conqueror Tamerlane sacked Baghdad in 1401, again massacring many of its inhabitants. He, too, built a pyramid of skulls. Tamerlane's invasion and conquest marked the end of Baghdad's greatness.
You might have a point if this scheme involved using money. In this case, however, the "payment" is a proof-of-work. The user is paying in CPU cycles "spent" to send the message.
No, it's not perfect. But not much is. People can and always will be able to spam. However, this measure does help. A lot.
:]) Heck, even mainstream outlets like CNN would be more likely to report on the issue if it's this obvious. Now, there will always be the utterly clueless who will continue to operate regardless. But there will be not be enough of them to provide the critical mass needed for spammers.
For starters, sending out 1/10 your E-Mail means you're no longer making a pile of money. Odds are, it will still be profitable. But that's not very motivating. Some spammers might not mind just running a few scripts to automate getting 1/10 of a pile money. However, the drop in profits will significantly ruin the market for spamming tools. If spammers no longer make a boatload, they're no longer going to pay a boatload for anonymailers, zombies, E-Mail lists, etc. Thus, people are going to be less motivated to code these damn things in the first place. That will make it a lot more difficult for those who actually want to spam to actually pull it off.
And with the more obvious symptoms of infection, more people will get it cleared up. And the more this happens, the more word will spread. Nobody educates a luser like another luser. (They at least speak a common language.
--LordPixie
Why can't they send out the messages via RSS or some simliar technology? You'd email your message to the list, & the list would RSS it to all the interested people. This has the advantage of letting people read without subscribing.
Seriously, does anybody know why this hasn't been done? I'm not an expert, so I wouldn't know of any limitations. I'm thinking of a cross between newsgroups & mailing lists.
testing out my trending skills
This is another hair-brained scheme that I can already see problems with.
JUST SUE THE PEOPLE WHO HIRE THE SPAMMERS, BIG TIME!
Drying up the demand mean that they don't make money. Not making money means that they don't bother spamming.
What they want is $$$.
Take away their market buy making it no longer cosat effective, by passing laws that will sue the pants off of anybody that send you Spam. And don't worry about borders. You can BUY the border agreement with a percent of the fines.
Its simple economics. Supply and demand. As long as there is a demand, these schmucks will supply.
Tony Sopranos may be immune but his customers are supposed to be legitimate businessmen... You can't sell squat when every Spam you send can get you X thousands in fines levied against you, in every jurisdiction and with every offense.
And NOBODY is going to bve AGAINST this law. (If they are, they're suspect...)
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You may be an anti-spam kook if...
Click Here, it's funny in the so-true-it's-sad way
It's obviously a bad idea to build a system that only lets a reasonable machine send 10 messages per day - probably even 100 per day is too low, depending on your applications. 1000 is usually fine. It turns out that there are calculations that scale based on memory speed rather than CPU speed, so there's a much lower spread between the slowest non-palmtops and the fastest CPUs out there (like 4:1 rather than 20:1). But even if each zombie can send out 10,000 messages/day instead of 10,000,000, that slows them down enough that you can detect them and kill them (or at least blacklist them...)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks