Subject: [Asrg] Consent-based Systems

From: Yakov Shafranovich <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2003 12:37:24 -0400

Considering the HTML discussion that has been going on,. I would like to 
start a new thread on discussing consent systems as per our charter 
(Gordon's proposal seeks to create a specific consent-based system). The 
charter (http://www.irtf.org/charters/asrg.html) states:

---snip---
The Anti-Spam Research Group (ASRG) focuses on the problem of unwanted 
email messages, loosely referred to as spam. The scale, growth, and effect 
of spam on the Internet have generated considerable interest in addressing 
this problem. Once considered a nuisance, spam has grown to account for a 
large percentage of the mail volume on the Internet. This unwanted traffic 
stands to affect local networks, the infrastructure, and the way that 
people use email.

The definition of spam messages is not clear and is not consistent across 
different individuals or organizations. Therefore, we generalize the 
problem into "consent-based communication". This means that an individual 
or organization should be able to express consent or lack of consent for 
certain communication and have the architecture support those desires. 
Expressing consent is more straightforward on an individual basis; as the 
solution is moved closer to the source, it is more difficult to express a 
policy that satisfies all downstream receivers. The research group will 
investigate the feasibility of: (1) a single architecture that supports 
this and (2) a framework that allows different systems to be plugged in to 
provide different pieces of the solution.

Possible components of such a framework may include:
Consent Expression Component: This involves recipients expressing a policy 
that gives consent or non-consent for certain types of communications

Policy Enforcement Component: This involves subsystems within the 
communication system that enforce the policy. The overall framework may 
involve multiple subsystems within the policy enforcement component. This 
may involve fail-open or fail-closed approaches. With a fail-open approach, 
the system must identify messages that do not have consent. For example, 
this may include approaches that determine the nature of a message based on 
its characteristics or input from a collaborative filtering system. With a 
fail-closed approach, the system must identify messages that do have 
consent and only allow those to be delivered. For example, consent may be 
expressed by a policy, by a "consent token" within the message, or by some 
payment that essentially purchases consent or delivery rights.

Source Tracking Component: This component provides deterrence to parties 
that consider violating the policy by facilitating identification and 
tracking of senders that violate the policy. This may require 
non-repudiation at the original sender, the sender's ISP, or some other 
entities involved in the communication system.
Note that "consent" need not necessarily be in advance. It is within scope 
for ASRG to consider frameworks in which receivers express their lack of 
consent only after having received a message.

The purpose of the ASRG is to understand the problem and collectively 
propose and evaluate solutions to the problem. While some techniques focus 
on local text classification approaches, many traditional and evolving 
techniques include approaches that involve new network architectures or 
changes to the existing applications and protocols.

ASRG will investigate the spam problem as a large-scale network problem. 
The ASRG will begin its work by developing a taxonomy of the problem and 
the proposed solutions. This taxonomy should involve casting the spam 
problem into different perspectives, such as examining the similarities 
between spam and denial-of-service; spam and intrusion 
detection/prevention; and spam and authentication, authorization, and 
accounting.

ASRG will consider the issues of deployment for proposed solutions, 
emphasizing the investigation of methods that have a realistic chance of 
wide-scale deployment.

The work of the ASRG will also include investigating techniques to evaluate 
the usefulness and cost of proposed solutions. Usefulness is described by 
the effectiveness, accuracy, and incentive structure of the system. The 
cost of the system refers to the burden imposed on users and operators of 
the communications system. These costs include any changes to the normal 
use of the system or actual changes in the monetary costs of using the 
system. The group will investigate evaluation infrastructures such as 
public trace data archives and research tools to measure and analyze the 
problem and the solutions.

ASRG will not pursue research into legal issues of spam, other than the 
extent to which these issues affect, support, or constrain the technology.
---snip---

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