A multi-layered architecture for preventing automated spam in the IP multimedia subsystem

The volume of spam in the Internet has far surpassed legitimate email. Marketers, fraudsters and political parties enjoy positive returns due to the large number of messages that can be transmitted at very low costs. Unfortunately there is an emerging trend that spam is now also being transmitted via instant messaging and voice calls. This is a concern for future next-generation networks, such as the IP multimedia subsystem, because insufficient security and privacy will hinder the take-up of these services. In this paper a multi-layered architecture is presented that blocks automated spammers. This is achieved using a combination of legislation, blacklists, whitelists, call-pattern analysis and Turing tests. The proposed solution is applied to a practical testbed and evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of this proposal.