Cloud enabled spam filtering services: Challenges and opportunities

The latest trend and technology buzzword in the IT industry is cloud computing. By leveraging on cloud computing's characteristics such as resilience, fault tolerance and high availability, a new generation of cloud based security solutions has emerged. This paper specifically looks at the notion of merging spam filtering with cloud computing and is one of the earliest studies done in this area. Following a discussion of spam filtering techniques and cloud computing descriptions, we look at the potential benefits and challenges for a cloud based spam filter. As an initial experiment, an existing server based spam filtering toolkit is deployed into a commercial cloud computing environment. The results show some drawbacks related to scalability. To address this shortcoming a new model for a scalable cloud spam analysis framework is proposed.

[1]  Jennifer Rexford,et al.  NoHype: virtualized cloud infrastructure without the virtualization , 2010, ISCA.

[2]  Gordon V. Cormack,et al.  Spam and the ongoing battle for the inbox , 2007, CACM.

[3]  Walmir M. Caminhas,et al.  A review of machine learning approaches to Spam filtering , 2009, Expert Syst. Appl..

[4]  Farnam Jahanian,et al.  CloudAV: N-Version Antivirus in the Network Cloud , 2008, USENIX Security Symposium.

[5]  Ray Hunt,et al.  Tightening the net: A review of current and next generation spam filtering tools , 2006, Comput. Secur..

[6]  John R. Levine.  Experiences with Greylisting , 2005, CEAS.

[7]  Ray Hunt,et al.  Current and New Developments in Spam Filtering , 2006, 2006 14th IEEE International Conference on Networks.

[8]  Dave Durkee,et al.  Why cloud computing will never be free , 2010, ACM Queue.

[9]  Yoichi Muraoka,et al.  HPC Benchmarks on Amazon EC2 , 2010, 2010 IEEE 24th International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications Workshops.

[10]  Anees Shaikh,et al.  Are clouds ready for large distributed applications? , 2010, OPSR.

[11]  Lori M. Kaufman,et al.  Can a Trusted Environment Provide Security? , 2010, IEEE Security & Privacy.

[12]  John R. Levine.  DNS Blacklists and Whitelists , 2010, RFC.

[13]  Aad P. A. van Moorsel,et al.  Dependability in the cloud: Challenges and opportunities , 2009, 2009 IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems & Networks.

[14]  Panagiotis Louridas.  Up in the Air: Moving Your Applications to the Cloud , 2010, IEEE Software.

[15]  Robert L. Grossman,et al.  The Case for Cloud Computing , 2009, IT Professional.

[16]  Chris Rose,et al.  A Break in the Clouds: Towards a Cloud Definition , 2011 .

[17]  Vipul Ved Prakash,et al.  Fighting Spam with Reputation Systems , 2005, ACM Queue.