Ostra: Leveraging Trust to Thwart Unwanted Communication

Online communication media such as email, instant messaging, bulletin boards, voice-over-IP, and social networking sites allow any sender to reach potentially millions of users at near zero marginal cost. This property enables information to be exchanged freely: anyone with Internet access can publish content. Unfortunately, the same property opens the door to unwanted communication, marketing, and propaganda. Examples include email spam, Web search engine spam, inappropriately labeled content on YouTube, and unwanted contact invitations in Skype. Unwanted communication wastes one of the most valuable resources in the information age: human attention. In this paper, we explore the use of trust relationships, such as social links, to thwart unwanted communication. Such relationships already exist in many application settings today. Our system, Ostra, bounds the total amount of unwanted communication a user can produce based on the number of trust relationships the user has, and relies ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: NSDI
• Authors: Alan Mislove, Ansley Post, Peter Druschel, P. Krishna Gummadi
• Keywords: Computer Networks, NSDI 2008, Social Networking Site, Trust Relationships, Unwanted Communication