SocialFilter: Introducing social trust to collaborative spam mitigation

We propose SocialFilter, a trust-aware collaborative spam mitigation system. Our proposal enables nodes with no email classification functionality to query the network on whether a host is a spammer. It employs Sybil-resilient trust inference to weigh the reports concerning spamming hosts that collaborating spam-detecting nodes (reporters) submit to the system. It weighs the spam reports according to the trustworthiness of their reporters to derive a measure of the system´s belief that a host is a spammer. SocialFilter is the first collaborative unwanted traffic mitigation system that assesses the trustworthiness of spam reporters by both auditing their reports and by leveraging the social network of the reporters´ administrators. The design and evaluation of our proposal offers us the following lessons: a) it is plausible to introduce Sybil-resilient Online-Social-Network-based trust inference mechanisms to improve the reliability and the attack-resistance of collaborative spam mitigation; b) using social links to obtain the trustworthiness of reports concerning spammers can result in comparable spam-blocking effectiveness with approaches that use social links to rate-limit spam (e.g., Ostra); c) unlike Ostra, in the absence of reports that incriminate benign email senders, SocialFilter yields no false positives.