TITLE: On the Computational Approach to Fighting Spam
SPEAKER: Cynthia Dwork (Microsoft Research)
DATE: 2:00-3:00
P.M., Tuesday, March 18, 2003
LOCATION: Half Dome, 3L (PA)
HOST: Vinay Deolalikar
ABSTRACT:
In CRYPTO'92 Dwork and Naor proposed the following simple technique
for combating spam:
If I don't know you, and you want your e-mail to appear in
my inbox, then you must attach to your message an easily
verified "proof of computational effort", just for me and
just for this message.
If the proof of effort requires, say, 10 seconds to compute, then the
economics of sending spam are radically altered: a single machine
can send only 8,000 messages per day. <
To decrease disparities between machines, Burrows proposed replacing
the original CPU-intensive pricing functions with memory-intensive
functions. Since memory latencies vary less across machines, these
functions should be more equitable. This talk reviews the
computational approach and focuses on the choice of function.
Joint work with Andrew Goldberg and Moni Naor.
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