Stockade performance and stability testing

Stockade is a network-layer spam-mitigation software designed to prevent spammers from consuming excess bandwidth on a ail server. Several experiments have been conducted on Stockade to assess the performance and stability of the software. The first experiment revealed that Stockade could achieve approximately a 93% reduction in spam traffic under our test conditions. Stockade's automatic rehabilitation feature was shown to operate accordingly and allowed blacklisted hosts to eventually become unblacklisted over a period of time. Further testing into the rehabilitation feature showed that a client re-blacklisted during their rehabilitation was eventually unblacklisted by Stockade. Lastly we examined Stockade's ethod of blocking an entire subnet which operated effectively. We also verified that neighbouring blacklisted/greylisted IP entries would be merged automatically into a single blacklist entry. In section VII I have mentioned possible future endeavors for testing Stockade. Section II is a brief introduction into Stockade and explains the configurable properties which have been varied throughout the testing. In Section III I have developed a contrived yet straightforward method of testing and gauging the performance of Stockade on a mail server. The experiment is designed to give a quantitative measure to the amount of bandwidth consumed with and without Stockade in use. Section IV examines the rehabilitation feature of Stockade. The experiments are designed to test whether Stockade's rehabilitation process works as alleged. Section V revisits the rehabilitation aspect of Stockade,and observes the effect of re-registering a client as a spammer during the rehabilitation period.