Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Is Anti-Virus A Necessary Evil?, Umakant Mishra

Umakant Mishra

While everybody is becoming more and more dependent on computers there are some unscrupulous people who continuously try to misuse the technology and get illegal and illegitimate benefit out of this sophisticated environment. Today the Internet is like a busy street or open market place where you find almost everything you want. As there are some obvious risks when you stand or move in a busy street such as you are likely to be pick pocketed or cheated or even knocked out by a rash driving vehicle. Similar threats loom over the head of a user when he is exposed …

How Do Viruses Attack Anti-Virus Programs, Umakant Mishra

Umakant Mishra

As the anti-viruses run in a trusted kernel level any loophole in the anti-virus program can enable attackers to take full control over the computer system and steal data or do serious damages. Hence the anti-virus engines must be developed with proper security in mind. The ant-virus should be able to any type of specially created executable files, compression packages or documents that are intentionally created to exploit the anti-virus’s weakness.

Viruses are present in almost every system even though there are anti-viruses installed. This is because every anti-virus, however good it may be, leads to some extent of false …

Protecting Anti-Virus Programs From Viral Attacks, Umakant Mishra

Umakant Mishra

During a fight between viruses and anti-viruses it is not always predictable that the anti-virus is going to win. There are many malicious viruses which target to attack and paralyze the anti-viruses. It is necessary for an anti-virus to detect and destroy the malware before its own files are detected and destroyed by the malware. The anti-virus may follow thorough testing and auditing procedures to fix all its bugs before releasing the software in the market. Besides the anti-virus may use all the obfuscation techniques like polymorphism that the viruses generally use to hide their codes. This article also shows …

Contradictions In Improving Speed Of Virus Scanning, Umakant Mishra

Umakant Mishra

Although everything in computing industry moves faster, the processor, memory speed, memory size, storage space etc. there is no improvement in virus scanning time. Although the processing speed has substantially increased, a typical full scanning is still taking several hours for an average computer. There is a serious need to improve the scanning time.

Contradiction is a stage of problem solving where the nature of the actual problem is clearly explained in terms of at least two parameters, one improving and another worsening. While emphasizing one parameter strengthens the system position emphasizing another parameter weakens the system.

In conventional methods …

Finding And Solving Contradictions Of False Positives In Virus Scanning, Umakant Mishra

Umakant Mishra

False positives are equally dangerous as false negatives. Ideally the false positive rate should remain 0 or very close to 0. Even a slightest increase in false positive rate is considered as undesirable.

Although the specific methods provide very accurate scanning by comparing viruses with their exact signatures, they fail to detect the new and unknown viruses. On the other hand the generic methods can detect even new viruses without using virus signatures. But these methods are more likely to generate false positives. There is a positive correlation between the capability to detect new and unknown viruses and false positive …

Methods Of Repairing Virus Infected Files, A Triz Based Analysis, Umakant Mishra

Umakant Mishra

Some computer viruses damage the host file during infection either partially or fully. These types of viruses are known as “file modifying viruses”. In these cases, the chance of recovery is less, but the anti-virus has to apply various methods with hope. The virus cleaner must know the characteristics of a virus in order to remove that virus. It cannot remove an unknown virus whose methods of infection are not known. If a virus is wrongly detected to be a different virus, then the cleaner will do wrong operations and build a garbage file.

Most viruses are capable of fixing …