A LinkBack is a mechanism for bloggers to obtain automatic notifications when other bloggers link to their posts. LinkBacks are an important pillar of the blogosphere because they allow blog posts to cross-reference each other. Over the last few years, spammers have consistently tried to abuse LinkBack mechanisms as they provide an automated way to inject spam into blogs. A recent study shows that a single blog may receive tens of thousands of spam LinkBack notifications per day. Therefore, there is a great need to develop defenses to protect the blogosphere from spammer abuses. To address this issue, we introduce TalkBack, a secure LinkBack mechanism. While previous methods attempt to detect LinkBack spam using content analysis, TalkBack uses distributed authentication and rate limiting to prevent spammers from posting LinkBack notifications.
Reclaiming the blogosphere talkback a secure linkback protocol for weblogs
Available Media | Publication (Pdf) Slides (pdf) |
Conference | European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS) - 2011 |
Authors | Elie Bursztein , Baptiste Gourdin , John C. Mitchell |
Citation |