Plan of Attack

Plan of attack for Honours Project.

TRY TO DO SIMPLE VERSION OF 1 OR 2 IN TIME FOR PROJECT MEETING

1.  Build a simple obfuscation tool based on user choice of techniques.
Suitable for users that only have static pages.
a.  simple Javascript - executing Javascript on client computes mailto tag
b.  translate e-mail name into an image
Emphasis here is on stitching existing tools together for easy use

[DO THIS FIRST]

2.  Experiment
Generate fresh e-mail names via different techniques and see which
generate spam.
a.  Control case - name in clear
b.  simple Javascript (as with 1a)
c.  image (as with 1b)
d.  in clear in pdf document
e.  current Informatics technique (name @ inf.ed.ac.uk) (purpose of this
is to check how effective current technique is)

[DO THIS SECOND -- SO AS TO MAXIMIZE TIME TO ACCUMULATE DATA]

3.  PDF e-mail obfuscation tool

[TECHNOLOGICALLY STRAIGHTFORWARD, BUT PERSONALLY, PHIL COULD MAKE USE OF
THIS]

4.  Diagnostic tool -- at users request, crawl their website and report
vulnerabilities [DO NOT RELEASE AS OPEN SOURCE]

[TECHNOLOGICALLY STRAIGHTFORWARD, PERSONALLY PHIL IS LESS INTERESTED IN
THIS]

5.  Study obfuscated code techniques and apply them to generate a more
sophisticated Javascript obfuscator

[THIS HAS MOST ACADEMIC CONTENT]

6.  Consider alternative to Javascript (e.g., challenge-response running
on server) for clients that do not have Javascript -- this probably
requires that user have CGI capability.

[TECHNOLOGICALLY STRAIGHTFORWARD]

7. User-engineer a site distributing these tools in order to make it
popular.  Count downloads to measure success.

[RELEVANT TO INFORMATICS, BUT USES DIFFERENT MUSCLES]

8. Apply AJAX techniques, possibly using Captcha and/or using self
modifyng code.

[PERSONALLY INTERESTING TO PHIL, MAY BE PRETTY CHALLENGING]

9. Build well-engineered tool

10.  Study which techniques are effective -- what sort of things will
spambots easily do (e.g., perhaps, execute Javascript) and not easily do
(e.g., if Javascript is expensive when will they stop)?

Overall plan:

Start with something simple, so you have a definite result under your
belt: 1, 2, 9, start 7.

Then spend bulk of time on something intellectually challenging, such as
5 or perhaps 8.