Re: Drop Dynamic Querying - It only benefits Spammers these days

From: "Elias Athanasopoulos" <[email protected]>
> On Wed, Jan 24, 2007 at 12:48:27AM +0100, Philippe Verdy wrote:
>> Well, I personnally don't find spam as a real problem, given the antispam
> 
> It is; it can be used to cause a DDoS attack.

Huh???? DDoS attacks are first based on the specification of a specific target, and being able to limit the traffic so that it will reach this target from everywhere.

Dynamic querying does not by itself specify a target, this is a search where the querier controls himself the number of *distinct*targets to reach, to get the expected results.

Spams on Gnutella are another nature: there are too many recipients that return fake hits for searches, and these spammers have anexcellent connectivity to the network allowing them to be reachable from almost everywhere.

Suppressing dynamic querying will not allow you to avoid reaching the spamming hosts. So you will still get their fake hits. Without dynamic querying, you'll reach in fact more spamming nodes, meaning that you'll be overflowed by even more fake hits.

So this is clearly not the solution to eliminate spammers.

The solution is then not to change the diameter of searches, but to make search routing even more specific. This is where a DHT-based routing will help (but it will not avoid spammers).

Another interesting idea is to stop sending results through the Gnet, and use direct routing for replies (OOB replies, through TCP or UDP), so that results can no more be intercepted so easily. This will give much more work for monitoring spammers that are targetting specific search results (alsobecause they will intercept less queries if they are more specifically routed) to decide which queries are interesting to reply.

Note that if morespecific routing of queries is implemented, we willbeable to raise the thresholds for dynamic querying, possibly up to the point where we reach the maximum TTL to cover the whole network that effectively has results. We will still reach spammers, but we will also reach more useful nodes, so this will limit the impact of spam hits.

But for effectively fighting spam, we need a parallel strategy to allow detecting and monitoring the level of pollutions. This is not easy, because even spammers could also send faked bad reputation notices to increase the presence of their own replies, as they will also usethis system to increase their reputation level with faked "good reputation notices".

So finally, the only thing that will limit spamis to have more non-spamming nodes in the network than spamming nodes. This is exactly the same problem with spam through email or IM, where there's no definitive solution other than having a good number of wellknown trustable sources of information about the presence of spammers, and an active collaborating community.

Running a trustable reputation system can become very costly, and this is where the whole business of antispam-system providers are working to help their customers. But is there someone ready to pay for this service, or readyto support this huge charge for free?