Using Markets and Spam to Combat Malware

We propose an economic mechanism to reduce the incidence of malware that delivers spam. Earlier research proposed attention markets as a solution for unwanted messages, and showed they could provide more net benefit than alternatives such as filtering and taxes. Because it uses a currency system, Attention Bonds faces a challenge. Zombies, botnets, and various forms of malware might steal valuable currency instead of stealing unused CPU cycles. We resolve this problem by taking advantage of the fact that the spam-bot problem has been reduced to financial fraud. As such, the large body of existing work in that realm can be brought to bear. By drawing an analogy between sending and spending, we show how a market mechanism can detect and prevent spam malware. We prove that by using a currency (i) each instance of spam increases the probability of detecting infections, and (ii) the value of eradicating infections can justify insuring users against fraud. This approach attacks spam at the source, a virtue missing from filters that attack spam at the destination. Additionally, the exchange of currency provides signals of interest that can improve the targeting of ads. ISPs benefit from data management services and consumers benefit from the higher average value of messages they receive. We explore these and other secondary effects of attention markets, and find them to offer, on the whole, attractive economic benefits for all – including consumers, advertisers, and the ISPs.

An Infrastructure for the Dynamic Distribution of Web Applications and Services

This paper presents the design and implementation of an infrastructure that enables any Web application, regardless of its current state, to be stopped and uninstalled from a particular server, transferred to a new server, then installed, loaded, and resumed, with all these events occurring "on the fly" and totally transparent to clients. Such functionalities allow entire applications to fluidly move from server to server, reducing the overhead required to administer the system, and increasing its performance in a number of ways: (1) Dynamic replication of new instances of applications to several servers to raise throughput for scalability purposes, (2) Moving applications to servers to achieve load balancing or other resource management goals, (3) Caching entire applications on servers located closer to clients.