Loughborough University
Browse

Detecting spam relays by SMTP traffic characteristics using an autonomous detection system

Download (2.76 MB)
thesis
posted on 2012-11-15, 08:54 authored by Hao Wu
Spam emails are flooding the Internet. Research to prevent spam is an ongoing concern. SMTP traffic was collected from different sources in real networks and analyzed to determine the difference regarding SMTP traffic characteristics of legitimate email clients, legitimate email servers and spam relays. It is found that SMTP traffic from legitimate sites and non-legitimate sites are different and could be distinguished from each other. Some methods, which are based on analyzing SMTP traffic characteristics, were purposed to identify spam relays in the network in this thesis. An autonomous combination system, in which machine learning technologies were employed, was developed to identify spam relays in this thesis. This system identifies spam relays in real time before spam emails get to an end user by using SMTP traffic characteristics never involving email real content. A series of tests were conducted to evaluate the performance of this system. And results show that the system can identify spam relays with a high spam relay detection rate and an acceptable ratio of false positive errors.

History

School

  • Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering

Publisher

© Hao Wu

Publication date

2011

Notes

A Doctoral Thesis. Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of Doctor of Philosophy of Loughborough University.

EThOS Persistent ID

uk.bl.ethos.587902

Language

  • en

Usage metrics

    Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering Theses

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC