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While the concept of collaboration provides a natural defense against massive spam
emails directed at large numbers of recipients, designing effective collaborative anti-
spam systems raises several important research challenges. First and foremost, since
emails may contain confidential information, any collaborative anti-spam approach has to
guarantee strong privacy protection to the participating entities. Second, the continuously
evolving nature of spam demands the collaborative techniques to be resilient to various
kinds of camouflage attacks. Third, the collaboration has to be lightweight, efficient, and
scalable. Towards addressing these challenges, this paper presents ALPACAS - a
privacy-aware framework for collaborative spam filtering. In designing the ALPACAS
framework, we make two unique contributions. The first is a feature-preserving message
transformation technique that is highly resilient against the latest kinds of spam attacks.
The second is a privacy-preserving protocol that provides enhanced privacy guarantees to
the participating entities. Our experimental results conducted on a real email dataset
shows that the proposed framework provides a 10 fold improvement in the false negative
rate over the Bayesian-based Bogofilter when faced with one of the recent kinds of spam
attacks. Further, the privacy breaches are extremely rare. This demonstrates the
strong privacy protection provided by the ALPACAS system.
In recent years, with the spread of the Internet, the number of spam e-mail has become
one of the most serious problems. A recent report reveals that 91% of all e-mail
exchanged in 2006 was spam. Using the Bayesian filter is a popular approach to
distinguish between spam and legitimate e-mails. It applies the Bayes theory to identify
spam. This filter proffers high filtering precision and is capable of detecting spam as per
personal preferences. However, the number of image spam, which contains the spam
message as an image, has been increasing rapidly. The Bayesian filter is not capable of
distinguishing between image spam and legitimate e-mails since it learns from and
examines only text data. Therefore, in this study, we propose an anti image spam
technique that uses image information such as file size. This technique can be easily
implemented on the existing Bayesian filter. In addition, we report the results of
the evaluations of this technique.
While the concept of collaboration provides a natural defense against massive spam e-
mails directed at large numbers of recipients, designing effective collaborative anti-spam
systems raises several important research challenges. First and foremost, since e-mails
may contain confidential information, any collaborative anti-spam approach has to
guarantee strong privacy protection to the participating entities. Second, the continuously
evolving nature of spam demands the collaborative techniques to be resilient to various
kinds of camouflage attacks. Third, the collaboration has to be lightweight,
efficient, and scalable. Toward addressing these challenges, this paper
presents ALPACAS—a privacy-aware framework for collaborative spam
filtering. In designing the ALPACAS framework, we make two unique
contributions. The first is a feature-preserving message transformation
technique that is highly resilient against the latest kinds of spam attacks. The
second is a privacy-preserving protocol that provides enhanced privacy
guarantees to the participating entities. Our experimental results conducted
on a real e-mail data set shows that the proposed framework provides a 10
fold improvement in the false negative rate over the Bayesian-based
Bogofilter when faced with one of the recent kinds of spam attacks. Further,
the privacy breaches are extremely rare. This demonstrates the strong
privacy protection provided by the ALPACAS system.