Re: hashcash spam prevention & firewalls

[Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>]

At 12:25 PM 12/13/1997 GMT, Antonomasia wrote:
>Hashcash in this context suffers from the 'fax effect' - the
>catch 22 of "We won't install what isn't widely used".

Makes sense to run it in a permissive mode for a while first -
sendmail++ could add hashcash to outgoing messages, and mark the
hashcash information in the headers on incoming messages.
The catch is getting it generated - you've got to include it
either in ISP's outgoing relays, or ideally in client software.
(Since hashcash is mainly for spam prevention, relays _could_
just check that there's some valid hashcash going by without
removing it - that's a bit tricky in multiple-recipient mail anyway,
since you'd normally need to include one hashcash per recipient.)
So if you want it adopted, you'd need to talk to the folks at
Qualcomm Eudora and at Netscape, and see if you can get Microslush
to include it in some of their mail clients.  This does have the
advantage that most of the CPU load is calculated on users' machines,
where there's plenty of spare horsepower, rather than on relay
machines which are not only easily tricked, but also tend to have
about as much horsepower as each of the thousands of clients they serve.

>>                         and b) it reduces bandwidth consumption on
>> dial up users pay per second lines as the spam is killed before they
>> see it.
>
>I have not (yet) persuaded demon to allow user-defined procmail rules
>on the ISP end of the phone lines.  Anybody know an ISP who does this ?

Almost any ISP that provides shell accounts can give you a mechanism for this,
whether it's procmail itself or your own relay program that feeds
your mail to procmail before delivering it to you.

Alternatively, some of the boring commercial services like AOL
have Spam-blocking options, and the pobox.com mail relay does also.
These aren't like having your own procmail, but they'll kill off
the well-known spammers for you, e.g. blocking c y b e r p r o m o
and some of the popular harvester programs that advertise themselves
in mail headers.



>> Better, is to require valid hashcash on all mail, _until_ the
>> recipient replies to a mail.  This is good because people rarely reply
>> to spammers.
>This means a huge database of who has replied to whom.  Must the
>reply have headers indicating In-Reply-To a recognisable message ?

That has real trouble with mailing lists.
It also creates a valuable soft-target traffic analysis database;
unlike current sendmail logs, it'll probably stick around for
an extended period of time, and be readily subpoenaed.
At a minimum, such a database should keep keyed hashes of addresses
rather than the addresses themselves - that still makes it possible
to check for individual known addresses, but makes it harder
to go fishing for everybody.  The reason for keyed hashes is to
require dictionary attacks to target individual machines,
but the added work factor for hashing the database of usual suspects
for aol.com, compuserve.com, hotmail.com, juno.com, worldnet.att.net,
demon.co.uk, and relay.national.sg isn't that large.

Also, it's easy for spammers to fake replies to themselves to 
prime the pump for their big spam.  And if you let mailing lists slide,
they can easily forge mail from the mailing lists.
				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
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