Ant Warfare Inspires the Next Generation of E-Mail Spam Filters

Spam: it's something that every person new to email quickly learns to hate. Sure, there are filters, but something always slips through - the consequence of an ongoing war between spammers and filter designers. Now new research has proposed that the next generation of filters takes a tip from an entirely different kind of war: one that goes on beneath our feet.

Stanford University Biologist Deborah Gordon recently spent a great deal of her time with ants and computer scientist Fernando Esponda to produce a novel model of distributed network rules, which reflects both the behavior of ant colonies and the human immune system - structures that work exceptionally hard to keep invaders out. The results could fortify our emailing systems, making them far more difficult for spammers to take advantage of.

That's at least according to a study recently published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society: B.

So how does this work? It's long been known that the immune system doesn't simply start with a blacklist of microbes or viruses it shouldn't let in. Instead it boasts a number of different cells specialized in hunting different types of intruders. In this way, even if one cell misses an invader, another cell will eventually run into it.

According to Gordon, ant colonies use a similar strategy. When ants are first born, they quickly learn to think of the smell of their nest and their relatives as "friendly." It is only after they start foraging outside the nest that they learn to associate new smells with foes (usually after encountering some kind of aggression). Of course, a single ant can't learn about all the threats in the world, but it doesn't have to.

"No one ant knows every foreigner, but because each ant knows a few foreigners, the whole colony knows how to keep foreigners out most of time," Gordon explained in a recent statement. "It's not perfect, but it's a lot cheaper (in terms of energy expenditure, etc)."

This then gave Gordon and her colleague Balaji Prabhakar an idea. The algorithm ants use to decide when to forage for food could mirror protocols to control internet traffic. To block spam traffic, email providers could then do away with their blacklist of spammers and simply crowdsource a master list from numerous emails and their own unique, ever-growing lists.

"It's an arms race," Gordon said. "But a distributed decision network, similar to how ants and immune cells operate, might be a better defense against hackers, because they can't simply penetrate the central system's code."

Instead, spammers would have to circumnavigate the vast knowledge of every email user and provider out there - a heck of an obstacle. It's too soon to say for sure, but I expect that one day it may actually be safe to believe that when foreign royalty emails you about being a long-lost relative, you really did just find new family... maybe.

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