Performance analysis of email systems under three types of attacks

Abstract

Email is a crucial part of our daily life, but email systems are facing increasing security threats such as attacks and spam. Because of this, new mechanisms are being provided to defend against the attacks and to reduce the amount of spam in email systems. Up to now, few available works have been reported on the performance evaluation of email systems under attack, which has become necessary for enhancing email security. In this paper, we propose a novel method to study the impact of three types of attacks on email systems. We construct a multiple queueing model to characterize three types of attacks integrally, and study the performance metrics of system security such as system availability, average queue length and information leakage probability. Numerical examples indicate that the approach of this paper is effective and efficient for dealing with the security analysis of email systems under attack. We believe that this work will open a new avenue for the performance evaluation of computer networks under email attack and other forms of attacks. © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.