Published Paper Details:

Unwanted unsolicited communications ("spam") first became a problem for email because of the negligible cost of sending email. It is increasingly becoming a problem for phone services due to falling costs of phone calls themselves and increasing international phone access in developing countries where labour costs are relatively low. Caller ID allows individuals to ignore calls from unknown sources, but business often revolves around acquiring new customers, and caller IDs can be spoofed. In this project you will investigate technical mechanisms that could help defend against such phone spam. Examples may include applying collaborative filtering techniques (as used to filter email spam) to filter phone calls and in extending phone system software (e.g. the Asterix PBX) to check (e.g. apply ingress filtering to) caller IDs. You will implement prototypes of such mechanisms in software, possibly in the form of a Smartphone app or Asterix module.