"The general idea is to force the sender of an e-mail to incur some kind of cost," said Cynthia Dwork, a senior researcher based at Microsoft's Silicon Valley facility.
The codename Penny Black is derived from an 1830s stamp used in Britain that reversed the cost of postage to the sender, rather than the original method of charging the letter recipient.
Similarly, an e-mail sender's computer would be required to spend about 10 seconds solving a complex math problem and attaching proof of the effort to a message, Dwork said.
For most users sending anywhere from a few to several dozen e-mails daily, that doesn't amount to too much computation time. Spammers who send millions of messages, however, would have to buy racks of computers.
"The currency in this case is computational," Dwork said.
Making spammers pay is not a new concept -- another similar model being considered is the "challenge-response" scenario whereby an e-mail recipient would require the sender to answer a question in order to accept a message.
The codename Penny Black is derived from an 1830s stamp used in Britain that reversed the cost of postage to the sender, rather than the original method of charging the letter recipient.
Similarly, an e-mail sender's computer would be required to spend about 10 seconds solving a complex math problem and attaching proof of the effort to a message, Dwork said.
For most users sending anywhere from a few to several dozen e-mails daily, that doesn't amount to too much computation time. Spammers who send millions of messages, however, would have to buy racks of computers.
"The currency in this case is computational," Dwork said.
Making spammers pay is not a new concept -- another similar model being considered is the "challenge-response" scenario whereby an e-mail recipient would require the sender to answer a question in order to accept a message.
~TheDoc - ICQ7765825
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