Abstract—Email spam has reached alarming proportions because it costs the sender very little to send; almost all of the costs are paid by the recipient, carrier and the email servers. Email spam’s inadvertently affect the performance of email servers which are kept busy in processing huge number of emails sent by the spammers. It also affects the productivity of the recipients who have to skim through lots of irrelevant emails to find the ones that actually require their attention. We propose a solution to control spam at the ingress points on the email servers by throttling the sender’s CPU i.e., making an email client pay a stamp fee for every email sent. The stamp fee is collected in terms of resource usage, in our case CPU cycles. The solution is based on the use of Discrete Logarithm Problem (DLP), which is considered to be one of the hardest mathematical problems to solve and is the basis for many cryptosystems. DLP is used to generate CPU stamps as a proof of the CPU cycles expended by the sender’s system. A separate stamp has to be calculated for each email and for each recipient which restricts the total number of emails that an email client can send in a time interval. We further claim that a normal user will not notice this cost in his day to day operations and a spammer will not be able to get past this mechanism.
Index Terms—CPU Stamps, CPU Throttling, Discrete Logarithm Problem, SMTP
Sandesh Jagannath is with Oracle Corp. in Bangalore, India (e-mail:Sandesh.Jagannath@gmail.com)
Radhesh Mohandas is with the department of Computer Science and Engineering, NITK-Surathkal, Karnataka, Indiathe department of Computer Science and Engineering
Cite: Sandesh Jagannath and Radhesh Mohandas, Member, IACSIT, "SPAM Control Using CPU Timestamps," International Journal of Information and Electronics Engineering vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 175-179, 2013.