Project ID:
RFP-2007-005
Title:
Reputation Services for Spam Classification
Summary:
Electronic Spam continues to be a problem in the Internet. Although
some progress has been made in identifying the sender (e.g., dkim),
such knowledge does not necessarily help decide whether we should
be willing to receive a message from that sender. The question
is: can Reputation Services be used to help determine which
messages are Spam?
Full Description:
The number of senders, and number of messages sent via the Internet
continues to increase. The increasing sophistication of Spam results
in a constant see-saw between Spam-filter effectiveness, and Spam's
ability to evade such filters. Together, these phenomena result in an increase in Spam that must
be reviewed by the end-user. Dkim and related efforts offer some hope
for validating the sending domain, or even identifying the sender.
But with billions of potential senders, knowing the sender's identity
may not be sufficient. Even if we reach a point where we can say,
"I know this message is from Joe xxx", how do we answer the
question, "Do I want to receive this message from Joe xxx?"
Is it feasible to advance the use of reputation services to help
answer the question, "do I want this message?"
Can we leverage social networking services, or combine evolving global
reputation services with local information (immediate and historical),
to help improve the effectiveness of message classification?
We invite proposals to explore methods addressing this problem space.
Solutions should be evaluated on (at least) effectiveness, cost,
and incremental deployment properties.
Constraints and other information:
This is a significant problem space, the solution to which will have
broad benefit for the Internet. As such, Cisco will not seek IPR,
and will also expect that promising results will be made available
to the community without limiting licenses, royalties, or other
encumbrances.
Proposal submission:
Cisco is not currently accepting proposals for this RFP.
Questions? Contact: research@cisco.com
