Privacy Preserving Spam Filtering

Abstract: Email is a private medium of communication, and the inherent privacy constraints form a major obstacle in developing effective spam filtering methods which require access to a large amount of email data belonging to multiple users. To mitigate this problem, we envision a privacy preserving spam filtering system, where the server is able to train and evaluate a logistic regression based spam classifier on the combined email data of all users without being able to observe any emails using primitives such as homomorphic encryption and randomization. We analyze the protocols for correctness and security, and perform experiments of a prototype system on a large scale spam filtering task. State of the art spam filters often use character n-grams as features which result in large sparse data representation, which is not feasible to be used directly with our training and evaluation protocols. We explore various data independent dimensionality reduction which decrease the running time of the protocol making it feasible to use in practice while achieving high accuracy.