Researchers Develop Next-Generation Antivirus System University of Michigan News Service (08/05/08) Moore, Nicol Casal
as it appeared in the August 11, 2008 edition of ACM TechNews.
CloudAV, a new cloud computing approach to malicious software detection developed at the University of Michigan (UM), could eliminate the need to install and update antivirus software on personal computers. CloudAV moves antivirus functionality into the network cloud and off of personal computers, and analyzes suspicious files using multiple antivirus and behavioral detection programs simultaneously. "CloudAV virtualizes and parallelizes detection functionality with multiple antivirus engines, significantly increasing overall protection," says UM professor Farnam Jahanian. To develop CloudAV, the researchers evaluated 12 traditional antivirus programs against 7,220 malware samples. Traditional antivirus software checks documents and programs as they are accessed, and because of performance constraints and program incompatibilities, typically only one antivirus program is used at a time. However, CloudAV can support a variety of malicious software detectors running in parallel to analyze a single incoming file. Each detector acts as its own virtual machine, so technical incompatibilities and security issues are not a problem. CloudAV is accessible to any computer or mobile device operating on the network that runs a simple software agent, and each time a computer or device receives a new document or program, the item is automatically detected and sent to the antivirus cloud for analysis. Click Here to View Full Article
