Hardware fault tolerance in a virtual environment

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Applies to other areas as well (spam filtering)

Applies to other areas as well - I am reminded of spam filtering. Many systems may boast "90%" or "99%" accuracy, but when you factor in the deluge of spam being sent, that may still mean several spam emails a day for some people.

In the area of spam filtering, I don't think even 99% is enough.

The technologies for more 9's is there IMHO - digital signatures and encryption could probably add a 9 to existing filtering solutions, especially if they are designed to work together.

A white list of valid senders with digital signatures could allow users to specify people to take priority in their email and to mark people in their contact list as "verified," perhaps with a visual cue or a bump to the top of the inbox.

A black list of known spammers with digital signatures could force spammers to continually waste CPU cycles generating new signatures, significantly decreasing the amount of spam they could send with the same resources. If the black lists can be distributed via P2P or managed by a huge company like Google, that could even place some strain on their entire bot network.

Digital signing can be very powerful:

-New spam sources can be quenched immediately after they are detected, and a digital signature can survive an IP address change.

-Spoofing legit users via some virus that steals signatures would be a one-shot chance. Not to mention highly visible once the user finds out he/she has been blocked. A "saturation point" where it is no longer feasible to spoof a lot of new users could conceivably be reached.

-New signatures from scratch take a lot of time to create. You can't just generate thousands of them per second on a single CPU like you can with email addresses. The entire bot net would be much slower if every bot had to spend time generating new key pairs.

-We need something to be adopted on a widespread scale. A lot of authentication and validation systems work best when there are a lot of people using them.

Posted by: CobraA1   Posted on: 03/10/09 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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