Leveraging Social Trust in Building Secure Email Networks

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Research Areas: Human Centric Security

Principal Investigator: Ramana Kompella

The openness of email systems allows any user to send unsolicited email (or spam).  Most current solutions to filtering email spam center on content-based filtering or domain blacklisting approaches, both of which are inaccurate and slow to adapt to the changing face of spam. We propose STAMP, short for Solicitation Token Authenticated Mail Protocol, as a server-side solution to filter unsolicited mail from ever reaching the end-user's inbox.

STAMP employs distributed access control leveraging the existence of both direct and indirect trust relationships between users. To reduce manual configuration of these trust relationships, STAMP also incorporates scoped broadcast flooding among mail servers to automatically discover paths of trust links through social networks.  STAMP is designed for users in high-stakes settings such as enterprises, sales personnel, and defense networks, where it is very important to ensure a spam-free mailbox as it seriously affects their productivity.

Personnel

Other PIs: Cristina Nita-Rotaru (Purdue University)

Other Faculty:

Students:

Keywords: filter, security, spam, STAMP, trust