Check out the new USENIX Web site.

USENIX Home . About USENIX . Events . membership . Publications . Students
Steps to Reducing Unwanted Traffic on the Internet Workshop — Abstract

Pp. 31–37 of the Proceedings

Detecting Spam in VoIP Networks

Ram Dantu and Prakash Kolan, University of North Texas, Denton

Abstract

Voice over IP (VoIP) is a key enabling technology for the migration of circuit-switched PSTN architectures to packet-based networks. The problem of spam in VoIP networks has to be solved in real time compared to e-mail systems. Many of the techniques devised for e-mail spam detection rely upon content analysis and in the case of VoIP it is too late to analyze the media after picking up the receiver. So we need to stop the spam calls before the telephone rings. From our observation, when it comes to receiving or rejecting a voice call people use social meaning of trust and reputation of the calling party. In this paper, we describe a multi-stage spam filter based on trust, and reputation for detecting the spam. In particular we used closed loop feedback between different stages in deciding if the incoming call is a spam or not. For verifying the concepts, we used a laboratory setup of several thousand soft-phones and a commercial grade proxy server. We verified our filtering mechanisms by simulating the spam calls and measured the accuracy of the filter. Results show that multistage feedback loop fares better than any single stage. Also, the larger the network size, the harder to detect a spam call. Further work includes understanding the behavior of different controlling parameters in trust and reputation calculations and deriving meaningful relationships between them.
  • View the full text of this paper in HTML and PDF, or the talk slides in PDF.

    Click here if you have forgotten your password Until July 2006, you will need your USENIX membership identification in order to access the full papers. The Proceedings are published as a collective work, © 2005 by the USENIX Association. All Rights Reserved. Rights to individual papers remain with the author or the author's employer. Permission is granted for the noncommercial reproduction of the complete work for educational or research purposes. USENIX acknowledges all trademarks within this paper.

  • If you need the latest Adobe Acrobat Reader, you can download it from Adobe's site.
To become a USENIX Member, please see our Membership Information.

?Need help? Use our Contacts page.

Last changed: 17 Aug. 2005 ch
Technical Program
SRUTI '05 Home
USENIX home