A Constant Time Complexity Spam Detection Algorithm for Boosting Throughput on Rule-Based Filtering Systems

Along with the barbarous growth of spams, anti-spam technologies including rule-based approaches and machine-learning thrive rapidly as well. In antispam industry, the rule-based systems (RBS) becomes the most prominent methods for fighting spam due to its capability to enrich and update rules remotely. However, the antispam filtering throughput is always a great challenge of RBS. Especially, the explosively spreading of obfuscated words leads to frequent rule update and extensive rule vocabulary expansion. These incremental obfuscated words make the filtering speed slow down and the throughput decrease. This paper addresses the challenging throughput issue and proposes a constant time complexity rule-based spam detection algorithm. The algorithm has a constant processing speed, which is independent of rule and its vocabulary size. A new special data structure, namely, Hash Forest, and a rule encoding method are developed to make constant time complexity possible. Instead of traversing each spam term in rules, the proposed algorithm manages to detect spam terms by checking a very small portion of all terms. The experiment results show effectiveness of proposed algorithm.