Computer Security Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words - 5

Computer Security - Essay Example These measures although controversial and undefined currently in their basic emphasis and in all certainty aim to reduce free access, ease of use, timeliness and the completely cost effective advantages that attract such a high level of abuse to the facility. This in itself is a true loss with legitimate users caught in the cross fire and being on the receiving end of all the barriers that are proposed to the easy usage of email and web access. The core problem with spam is that it bears the senders almost no cost to send the spam. The network service providers and the recipients bear the cost. Hence the cost associated with spam weighs down on the receivers in terms of reduced convenience and higher cost resulting from the proposed proof of work that aims to alter the economics of spam, by requiring that the send commit to a per-email cost. There are many reasons why a systemic spam response has not been adopted. This is mainly because the proposed responses lack in suitable aspects and hence cannot be generally adopted as a counter for the issue at hand. This issue being largely the enabling factor that spam is cheap to send. The most original and highly examined model to deter spam is the proof-of-word model. This comprises a set of proposals, in which email senders would be required to pay money, perform a resource-intensive computation, perform a series of memory operations, or post a bond for each message sent. The working assumption of this model was to deter spam by making it uneconomic to send a large number of messages, while enabling legitimate users to send small number of messages. Hence proof of work reverses the cost model of email by charging the sender instead of the user. All these components of the proof of work model seem promising however a uniform POW mechanism will not. Firstly because if it is expensive enough to stop spammers it must be so expensive that it will also stop legitimate users. Infact, the cost to a spammer would have to be a magnitude higher than the cost to a legitimate user because spammers face very different production costs due to spambots. The model does not accommodate these variable magnitudes. Second it is proposed that POW might work if it is combined with anti spam efforts such as reputation systems and per-email spam identification mechanisms. However criticism of this approach is based on the fact that these efforts suffer from penalizing new IP addresses and discarding incorrectly identified email which is a type of effort difficult to balance and will result in either new entrants being not allowed to send email, or each ne IP address will be allowed to send enough email that spam remains profitable. Changes to the current infrastructure are necessary to counter spam. It is suggested in various researches that unsolicited bulk email is such a problem on the internet mainly because the current economic framework and the basic infrastructure for email handling does little to discourage it . It