The Penny Black Project is a
Microsoft Research
Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. It was created in 1991 by Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technologi ...
project that tries to find effective and practical ways of fighting
spam
Spam most often refers to:
* Spam (food), a consumer brand product of canned processed pork of the Hormel Foods Corporation
* Spamming, unsolicited or undesired electronic messages
** Email spam, unsolicited, undesired, or illegal email messages
...
. Because identifying spams consumes a recipient's time, the idea is to make the sender of emails "pay" a certain amount for sending them. The currency or the mode of payment could be
CPU cycle The instruction cycle (also known as the fetch–decode–execute cycle, or simply the fetch–execute cycle) is the cycle that the central processing unit (CPU) follows from boot-up until the computer has shut down in order to process instructions ...
s,
Turing test
The Turing test, originally called the imitation game by Alan Turing in 1949,. Turing wrote about the ‘imitation game’ centrally and extensively throughout his 1950 text, but apparently retired the term thereafter. He referred to ‘ iste ...
s or
memory cycle
Memory is the faculty of the mind by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. It is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action. If past events could not be remembered, ...
s. Such a payment would limit spammers' ability to send out large quantities of emails quickly.
The project's name is derived from the
Penny Black
The Penny Black was the world's first adhesive postage stamp used in a public Mail, postal system. It was first issued in the United Kingdom on 1 May 1840 but was not valid for use until 6 May. The stamp features a profile of Queen Victoria.
...
, the world's first adhesive stamp used for prepaid postage.
Objective
The goal of the project is to move the e-mail costs from the receiver to the sender. The general idea is that if the sender must prove that they have expended a certain amount of effort specifically for the receiver and the message alone.
The project aims to devise a method to do this without introducing additional challenge-response mechanisms and third parties, and without requiring extra maintenance and updates, while retaining the current architecture of the e-mail system.
Ticket server
One of the project's ideas was the "ticket server", a credit-based method for validating emails. Tickets would be required to perform actions, such as sending emails. There are three operations the ticket server provides: "request ticket", "cancel ticket", and "refund ticket".
The server would allow the user to request a ticket in exchange for a
proof of work
Proof of work (also written as proof-of-work, an abbreviated PoW) is a form of cryptographic proof in which one party (the ''prover'') proves to others (the ''verifiers'') that a certain amount of a specific computational effort has been expended ...
: expending
CPU cycle The instruction cycle (also known as the fetch–decode–execute cycle, or simply the fetch–execute cycle) is the cycle that the central processing unit (CPU) follows from boot-up until the computer has shut down in order to process instructions ...
s solving hard algorithms with processing power,
Turing test
The Turing test, originally called the imitation game by Alan Turing in 1949,. Turing wrote about the ‘imitation game’ centrally and extensively throughout his 1950 text, but apparently retired the term thereafter. He referred to ‘ iste ...
s, or even just by paying money. The server could also cancel a ticket. For example, after receiving an email with a ticket, the receiver could request the ticket to be cancelled so it cannot be reused. The person who cancels a ticket also has the option to refund the ticket to the sender. This causes the original sender to regain a new ticket. For example, a user might refund a ticket that came with an email if it was not spam.
Using this, friendly and trusted emails would have little to no cost as tickets would be frequently refunded. However, spammers would be required to invest either a lot of computing time or money in order to create enough tickets to send large numbers of e-mails.
See also
*
Proof-of-work system
Proof of work (also written as proof-of-work, an abbreviated PoW) is a form of Cryptography, cryptographic proof (truth), proof in which one party (the ''prover'') proves to others (the ''verifiers'') that a certain amount of a specific computatio ...
*
Hashcash
Hashcash is a proof-of-work system used to limit email spam and denial-of-service attacks. Hashcash was proposed in 1997 by Adam Back and described more formally in Back's 2002 paper "Hashcash – A Denial of Service Counter-Measure". In Hashcash ...
*
Internet Mail 2000
*
Anti-spam techniques
Various anti-spam techniques are used to prevent email spam (unsolicited bulk email).
No technique is a complete solution to the spam problem, and each has trade-offs between incorrectly rejecting legitimate email (false positives) as opposed t ...
References
External links
An overview of the Penny Black Project from Microsoft(archived fro
the original
{{Microsoft Research
Anti-spam
Microsoft Research
Research projects