Industry Group Takes Aim at Spam

Underscoring growing concern over spam, the Internet Engineering Task Force has created a new Anti-Spam Research Group that puts unsolicited commercial e-mail in its crosshairs by aiming to setting standards for spam detection and potential legislation.

"We decided to go ahead now because it's clear that spam has become a serious problem for organizations," said Paul Judge, who will chair the new group (ASRG). He is also the director of research and development at e-mail security firm CipherTrust.

Although a patchwork of spam-fighting tools are already available, the industry has yet to take a systematic approach to the problem, Judge added.

However, the topic is taking the spotlight at a number of industry events, such as the Privacy and Data Security Summit in Washington, D.C. this week. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology hosted a well-attended spam conference in January.

Seeking a Standard

The anti-spam group will investigate whether a single architecture can be implemented that will allow e-mail receivers to express their consent and, more importantly, lack of consent for certain communications. This approach is due to the fact that everyone's definition of spam is different, the group said, making e-mail a consent-based communication.

"The definition of spam is highly subjective, so by labeling it a consent-based communication we can come up with an architecture that supports that idea," Judge said.

The anti-spam group wants to develop an architecture with three components: consent expression, consent enforcement, and source-tracking.

According to Judge, it's important to push consent expression back closer to the source--such as at the Internet backbone and ISP level--to most effectively block spam. Judge envisions a system in which ISPs set rules for the type of e-mail that they stream, and then the e-mail is further filtered at the Internet gateway and end-user levels.

Search For Spammers

Tracking down spammers will also be a major component, Judge said. He said overlooking this approach is a weakness in current efforts. The group will not only be looking to endorse spam-fighting legislation but will also consider recommending technical changes that would make it easier to identify spammers, Judge said.

"E-mail protocol was introduced many years ago and it is very trusting and open," he said.

However, the solutions the group eventually proposes will be based on their chance for wide-scale deployment and on their cost, in terms of both money and how much end-users would have to change how they use e-mail, Judge said.

The anti-spam group will work within the organization' s Internet Research Task Force. ASRG will meet for the first time March 20 in San Francisco. Judge said he expects several hundred industry players to attend from different sectors of the Internet community.