Rescuing trusted nodes from filtering of untrusted network entities

Abstract

Network entities controlling a set of nodes may vary by trustworthiness, such as tolerance for nodes that send spam, distribute malware, or perform denial-of-service attacks. A device receiving such activities may identify a trust rating of the network entity and apply appropriately stringent filtering (such as spam evaluation) to activities received from nodes controlled by the network entity. However, a poor trust rating of a network entity may subject a legitimate node controlled by the network entity to inefficiently or unfairly stringent activity filtering. Instead, the device may evaluate the activities of a particular node, assign a trust rating to the node, and if the trust rating of the node is higher than the trust rating of the network entity, apply less stringent activity filtering to the activities of the node, thereby 'rescuing' the node from the more stringent activity filtering applied to the other nodes of the network entity.