Vipul's Razor
Encyclopedia
Vipul's Razor is a checksum
-based, distributed, collaborative, spam
-detection-and-filtering network. Through user contribution, Razor establishes a distributed and constantly updating catalogue of spam in propagation that is consulted by email clients to filter out known spam. Detection is done with statistical and randomized signatures that efficiently spot mutating spam content. User input is validated through reputation assignments based on consensus on report and revoke assertions which in turn is used for computing confidence values associated with individual signatures.
Vipul's Razor was written in Perl
by (primarily) Vipul Ved Prakash
.
Some e-mail clients directly use Razor. It is also used by some server-side spam filters (for example, SpamAssassin
).
A commercial derivative of Razor, named Cloudmark Authority, is available from Cloudmark
.
Checksum
A checksum or hash sum is a fixed-size datum computed from an arbitrary block of digital data for the purpose of detecting accidental errors that may have been introduced during its transmission or storage. The integrity of the data can be checked at any later time by recomputing the checksum and...
-based, distributed, collaborative, spam
E-mail spam
Email spam, also known as junk email or unsolicited bulk email , is a subset of spam that involves nearly identical messages sent to numerous recipients by email. Definitions of spam usually include the aspects that email is unsolicited and sent in bulk. One subset of UBE is UCE...
-detection-and-filtering network. Through user contribution, Razor establishes a distributed and constantly updating catalogue of spam in propagation that is consulted by email clients to filter out known spam. Detection is done with statistical and randomized signatures that efficiently spot mutating spam content. User input is validated through reputation assignments based on consensus on report and revoke assertions which in turn is used for computing confidence values associated with individual signatures.
Vipul's Razor was written in Perl
Perl
Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions and become widely popular...
by (primarily) Vipul Ved Prakash
Vipul Ved Prakash
Vipul Ved Prakash is a software engineer and entrepreneur, most widely known for creating Vipul's Razor, a collaborative anti-spam system. In 2001, Vipul co-founded Cloudmark, a company that...
.
Some e-mail clients directly use Razor. It is also used by some server-side spam filters (for example, SpamAssassin
SpamAssassin
SpamAssassin is a computer program released under the Apache License 2.0 used for e-mail spam filtering based on content-matching rules. It is now part of the Apache Foundation....
).
A commercial derivative of Razor, named Cloudmark Authority, is available from Cloudmark
Cloudmark
Cloudmark, Inc is a privately held company, San Francisco-based, providing protection against spam, viruses, phishing, and similar threats that affect email....
.
External links
- Razor homepage
- Pyzor homepage - Initially a PythonPython (programming language)Python is a general-purpose, high-level programming language whose design philosophy emphasizes code readability. Python claims to "[combine] remarkable power with very clear syntax", and its standard library is large and comprehensive...
implementation of Razor. - Cloudmark
- MayFlower Software - Lotus Notes implementation