NSDI '08 – Abstract
Pp. 15–30 of the Proceedings
Ostra: Leveraging Trust to Thwart Unwanted Communication
Alan Mislove and Ansley Post, Max Planck Institute for Software Systems and Rice University; Peter Druschel and Krishna P. Gummadi, Max Planck Institute for Software Systems
Abstract
Online communication media such as email, instant messaging, bulletin
boards, voice-over-IP, and social networking sites allow any sender to reach
potentially millions of users at near zero marginal cost. This
property enables information to be exchanged freely: anyone with Internet
access can publish content. Unfortunately, the same property
opens the door to unwanted communication, marketing, and propaganda.
Examples include email spam, Web search engine spam, inappropriately
labeled content on YouTube, and unwanted contact invitations in
Skype. Unwanted communication wastes one of the most valuable
resources in the information age: human attention.
In this paper, we explore the use of trust relationships, such as
social links, to thwart unwanted communication. Such relationships
already exist in many application settings today. Our system, Ostra,
bounds the total amount of unwanted communication a user can produce
based on the number of trust relationships the user has, and relies on
the fact that it is difficult for a user to create arbitrarily many
trust relationships.
Ostra is applicable to both messaging systems such as email and
content-sharing systems such as YouTube. It does not rely on automatic
classification of content, does not require global user
authentication, respects each recipient's idea of unwanted
communication, and permits legitimate communication among parties who
have not had prior contact. An evaluation based on data gathered from
an online social networking site shows that Ostra effectively thwarts
unwanted communication while not impeding legitimate communication.
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