On Memory-Bound Functions for Fighting Spam

In 1992, Dwork and Naor proposed that e-mail messages be accompanied by easy-to-check proofs of computational effort in order to discourage junk e-mail, now known as spam. They proposed specific CPU-bound functions for this purpose. Burrows suggested that, since memory access speeds vary across machines much less than do CPU speeds, memory-bound functions may behave more equitably than CPU-bound functions; this approach was first explored by Abadi, Burrows, Manasse, and Wobber [8]. We further investigate this intriguing proposal. Specifically, we

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: CRYPTO
• Authors: Cynthia Dwork, Andrew Goldberg, Moni Naor
• Keywords: CPU-bound Functions, CRYPTO 2003, Junk E-mail, Specific Cpu-bound Functions