Subject: Re: [Asrg] A question on trust and trust propagation.

From: "Jon Kyme" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 07 Mar 2005 17:47:57 +0000

> 
> Maybe the information should not be a binary black/white, but a
> probability/confidence value? "Mail from that IP is spam with a
> probability of 99%" or something like that? For most IPs this will
> usually be close to 0% or 100%, but it should be somewhere in between
> if there are too few samples, or if the host is transitioning from bad
> to good or vice versa.
> 
> (I have to look a GOSSiP again - I think that was quite similar)
> 

You're right, as I remember, Mark Langston's GOSSiP responded to queries
with a reputation score (and an associated confidence rating - did this get
done?).

> Sender domains/addresses are currently completely useless as trustable
> entities.

On their own, perhaps. GOSSiP proposed a domain / IP duple as the 
reputation identity, by which I guess some of the issues with "granularity"
were (might be) avoided. There were also schemes to amalgamate entities for
scoring purposes - perhaps by ref. to "authorisation" mechanisms such as
SPF.

Actually, I really liked the ideas behind GOSSiP - particularly the way
trust between nodes might be established informally (or not), and then
modulated dynamically (without human intervention) would have been neat (I
don't know how far that got).

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From: Eugene Crosser <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 09 Mar 2005 16:10:08 +0300

> don't know how far that got).

I, too, think that GOSSiP[1] is based on rather clever ideas: 
"two-dimentional" metric (reputation and confidence), automatically 
established inter-node trust.  Unfortunately, the project looks dead.

My idea of good practical anti-spam solution would be a GOSSiP-like 
distributed reputation system combined with greylisting[2] of sites with 
low confidence rating.

[1] http://gossip-project.sourceforge.net/
[2] http://hcpnet.free.fr/milter-greylist/

Eugene