Canning spam in wireless gossip networks

Abstract

Once a problem associated only with email, spam is now affecting other media, such as instant messaging, blogs, newsgroups and mobile phone messaging. As wireless networks become more commonplace, we can expect that spam will find its way into upcoming wireless communication services. This paper studies the threat posed by malicious nodes inserting spam in a wireless network using gossiping as a method for information dissemination. We identify the security mechanisms needed to protect our gossip network against the proliferation of spam, reducing the problem to a matter of finding and removing corrupted messages. Finally, we propose a probabilistic method of integrity checking to contain the spread of spam which we evaluate through extensive simulations