AUTOSCALABILE DISTRIBUTED ANTI-SPAM SMTP SYSTEM BASED ON KUBERNETES

Nadja Gavrilovic, Vladimir Ciric

DOI Number
https://doi.org/10.2298/FUEE2104525G
First page
525
Last page
546

Abstract


Due to the increasing amount of spam email traffic, email users are in increasing danger, while email server resources are becoming overloaded. Therefore, it is necessary to protect email users, but also to prevent SMTP system overload during spam attacks. The aim of this paper is to design and implement an autoscalable distributed anti-spam SMTP system based on a Proof of work concept. The proposed solution extends SMTP protocol in order to enable the evaluation of client’s credibility using the Proof of work algorithm. In order to prevent resource overload during spam attacks, the antispam SMTP system will be implemented in a distributed environment, as a group of multiple anti-spam SMTP server instances. Kubernetes architecture will be used for system distribution, configured with the possibility of autoscaling the number of anti-spam SMTP server instances depending on the system load. The implemented system will be evaluated during a distributed spam attempt, simulated by a custom made traffic generator tool. Various performance tests will be given: (1) The proposed system’s impact on client’s behaviour and the overall amount of spam messages, (2) The performance of the undistributed anti-spam SMTP server during spam attack, in terms of resource load analysis (3) Autoscaling demonstration and evaluation of proposed distributed system’s performance during spam attack. It will be shown that the proposed solution has the possibility of reducing the amount of spam traffic, while processing tens of thousands of simultaneous SMTP client requests in a distributed environment.


Keywords

anti-spam, spam, email, smtp, kubernetes, proof of work

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ISSN: 2217-5997 (Online)

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