Stopping Spam Before It Hits the Mail Server

Al writes "A team of researchers at the Georgia Institute for Technology say they have developed a way to catch spam before it even arrives on the mail server. Instead of bothering to analyze the contents of a spam message, their software, called SNARE (Spatio-temporal Network-level Automatic Reputation Engine), examines key aspects of individual packets of data to determine whether it might be spam. The team, led by assistant professor Nick Feamster, analyzed 2.5 million emails collected by McAfee in order to determine the key packet characteristics of spam. These include the geodesic proximity of end mail servers and the number of ports open on the sending machine. The approach catches spam 70 percent of the time, with a 0.3 false positive rate. Of course, revealing these characteristics could also allow spammers to fake their packets to avoid filtering."

Comments

It'll work..except when it doesn't.

[MrCrassic]

I'll go first.

All spammers have to do is change the characteristics of the message. It's always going to be a cat and mouse game, just like antivirus and antispyware, so saying that they've found THE solution to blocking spam from hitting the server is slightly irresponsible.

Re:It'll work..except when it doesn't.

[gnick]

I realize that you're kidding, but removing more than expected is something that I consider unacceptable. If it hits the mail server and gets shuffled off into a spam folder with 100 pieces of trash, that's fine. But if it's not even going to make it to the mail server, 0.3% is too high a false positive rate.

RFC 3514

[Anonymous Coward]

Problem already solved back in 2003, I don't get any spam now.

Re:RFC 3514

[darpo]

For those who don't feel inclined to Google for it:

"The evil bit is a fictional IPv4 packet header field proposed in RFC 3514, a humorous April Fools' Day RFC from 2003 authored by Steve Bellovin. The RFC recommended that the last remaining unused bit in the IPv4 packet header be used to indicate whether a packet had been sent with malicious intent, thus making computer security engineering an easy problem."

Spammers evolve from experience

[pearl298]

Just like other criminals, spammers must quickly respond to what actually works. In essence this is the flaw in any "security by obscurity" scheme, the bad guys simply respond to whatever works. If you get to try several billion times a day then you can try a whole lot of combinations.

.3% false positive is pretty high

[Dynedain]

That means that in my office of 50 people, with an average of 50 emails per day (a very very low estimate), we'd get 7-8 false positives daily. I'd hear bloody murder if that was the case.

We get a lot more mail than that per day, and our spamassassin without autolearning (simply flag anything higher than 5.0) does a hell of a lot better job than that... down in the range of 1-2 false positives a month. Assuming a low daily average of emails (like my example), that's .002% false positives.

Re:I don't get it...

[BlueKitties]

Many spam messages are propagated by botnets, spoofed IPs, etc, so that isn't a perfect solution. Really, we need to combine different approaches, instead of trying to find a holy-grail.

False positive rate?

[johndiii]

0.3 would be terrible - three out of ten false positives. 0.3 percent - what the article actually says - is not too bad. But current techniques allow me to check the spam bin for such messages. This technique would pretty much preclude that capability, since the mail would never arrive at the server. I'm not sure that a rate of 0.003 would be acceptable under those circumstances.

Re:False positive rate?

[vux984]

And when my mail filters blocks spam, it sends out a message with redirections to an alternative gsm-number telling them to call me so I can whitelist the adres.

That's called back scatter and its as bad as spam.

Think about it, my mail servers block about 35,000 spam per day. If they sent a message to each failed recipient with alternative instructions, that would be 35,000 messages I sent out. Some 34,990 of those messages would either be undeliverable or would get delivered to people who had nothing to do with the original message. You are effectively clogging up a bunch of innocent peoples mail systems with your messages.

Put it another way, suppose some spammer sends 1,000,000 messages with your email address spoofed as the sender. If everyone else did what you do, you would then receive 1,000,000 messages back to your inbox giving you alternate instructions to contact these people.

You wouldn't want that. Nobody else does either. So please stop.

Spatio-temporal

[CopaceticOpus]

So this software functions in both space AND time? Fascinating.

It's good that they specified that in the name, to avoid questions such as "Will this software work in the universe which we inhabit?"

Re:Not practical.

[oldspewey]

what happens when someone tries to contact me out of the blue before I have a chance to white list them?

Absolutely nothing happens ... at least from your perspective.

Wrong approach

[Animats]

The fundamental property of spam is that it involves many similar messages going to a large number of destinations. That's what to look for. Google can do that, because they manage a very large number of mailboxes with a single system. SpamCop used to do that, but they had to be in the mail-forwarding business to do it and that was too expensive.

Trying to detect spam by looking only at the mail for a single account is inherently a form of guessing. The existing technologies are reasonably good, but not good enough that the spammers give up.

Re:"IP addresses, he notes, are easy to fake."

[Anonymous Coward]

oh ye of little knowledge.

Oblig Checklist

[crymeph0]

Your post advocates a

(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(x) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
(x) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!

Obligatory!!

[jammindice]

Your post advocates a

( X ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( X ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( X ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( X ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( X ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( X ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( X ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough Furthermore, this is what I think about you: ( X ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!

Re:"IP addresses, he notes, are easy to fake."

[Minwee]

It's easy, really. All you need to do is use a fake address which happens to be exactly the same as your real address.

It's as simple as closing a user's browser window without using Javascript.