iSATS: Leveraging Identity based Sender Authentication for Spam Mitigation

Abstract

A vast majority of spam emails today are sent from botnets with forged sender addresses. This has attracted researchers over the years to develop email sender authentication mechanism as a promising way to verify identity of the senders. In this paper we introduce iSATS, a new email sender authentication system based on Identity-based public key cryptography. iSATS leverages an identity based signature scheme to provide a reliable and easy way to bind the identity of legitimate sender to an email. Unlike the popular existing solutions like SPF and DKIM, it is hard for the spammer to adopt iSATS.