IP Score

Deprecation warning!

This module is deprecated and is removed from Rspamd 2.0 due to several serious design flaws, e.g. reputation tokens had no decay leading to a situation with a positive loopback link and thus incorrect reputation calculations. The existing configuration could be automatically transferred to reputation module. Unfortunately, the existing reputation built cannot be transferred for many reasons. One of the reasons is that it was simply wrong in many cases.

Theory of operation

IP Score tracks the number of messages received from a given IP/subnet/ASN/country and records this alongside a total score. The scores which are added to these total scores are calculated as follows:

ip_score = action_multiplier * tanh (e * (metric_score/score_divisor))

e is the mathematical constant: 2.718. tanh is the hyperbolic tangent function. metric_score is the score Rspamd assigned the message. action_multiplier is the multiplier configured for the metric action, or zero in case action is no action and score is positive. score_divisor is supplied from setting with the same name- if not supplied no division is done (recommended value: 10-100).

Default multipliers are shown below:

actions {
  reject = 1.0;
  "add header" = 0.25;
  "rewrite subject" = 0.25;
  "no action" = 1.0;
}

So with these settings:

  • a message with score -0.1 gets ip score: -0.265
  • a message with score -1.0 gets ip score: -0.991
  • a message with positive score & no action action always gets ip score: 0.00
  • a message with add header action & score 7 gets ip score: 0.249
  • a message with reject action and score 15 gets ip score: 1.0

For each IP address/ASN/country/subnet Rspamd stores a key in a hash in Redis the value of which is formatted: total ip score|total number of messages received - for each incoming message Rspamd increments the total number of messages by one and adds the new ip score to the total.

Once a predefined number of messages from a given IP address/subnet/ASN/country have been seen (10 in default configuration), Rspamd will begin to add scores to messages, which are calculated as follows:

First Rspamd calculates a subscore for whichever things it has seen enough messages for (IP address/subnet/ASN/country) as follows:

subscore = score_multiplier * tanh(e * total_score / total_messages)
subscore = floor(subscore * 10)

Score multiplier is dependent on the component the subscore is being generated for; default multipliers are shown below:

scores {
  asn = 0.5;
  country = 0.1;
  ipnet = 0.8;
  ip = 1.0;
}

Subscores are added to each other to determine a total. If min_score or max_score are defined in configuration these set a lower/upper bound for the total score.

Configuration

Refer to example configuration below for available settings. To use default settings, just configure Redis either globally or just for ip_score and assign a weight to the IP_SCORE symbol. Module configuration should be added to /etc/rspamd/local.d/ip_score.conf.

# how each action is treated in scoring
actions {
  reject = 1.0;
  "add header" = 0.25;
  "rewrite subject" = 0.25;
  "no action" = 1.0;
}
# how each component is evaluated
scores {
  asn = 0.5;
  country = 0.1;
  ipnet = 0.8;
  ip = 1.0;
}
# prefix for asn hashes
asn_prefix = "a:";
# prefix for country hashes
country_prefix = "c:";
# hash table in redis used for storing scores
hash = "ip_score";
# prefix for subnet hashes
ipnet_prefix = "n:";
# minimum number of messages to be scored
lower_bound = 10;
# the metric to score (usually "default")
metric = "default";
# upper and lower bounds at which to cap total score
#max_score = 10;
#min_score = -5;
# Amount to divide subscores by before applying tanh
score_divisor = 10;
# list of servers (or configure redis globally)
#servers = "localhost";
# symbol to be inserted
symbol = "IP_SCORE";

You will also have to register some weight for the symbol in metric. For example you could add the following to /etc/rspamd/local.d/metrics.conf:

symbol "IP_SCORE" {
  weight = 2.0;
  description = "IP reputation";
}