Saturday, August 9, 2008

'Network cloud' for Internet bugs

That constant cribbing about the antivirus software in your computer may soon be a thing of the past, thanks to a new "cloud computing" approach developed at University of Michigan, that tackles computer bugs seamlessly on the Internet.

Named CloudAV, the new approach moves antivirus functionality into the "network cloud" and off personal computers.

It analyses suspicious files using multiple antivirus and behavioural detection programs simultaneously.

The researchers say that antivirus software from popular vendors are not very effective, and that new threats go undetected for an average of seven weeks.

They also say that antivirus engines have severe vulnerabilities too. "CloudAV virtualises and parallelises detection functionality with multiple antivirus engines, significantly increasing overall protection," said Farnam Jahanian, professor of computer science and engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

For coming up with this novel approach, the researchers evaluated 12 traditional antivirus software programs against 7,220 malware samples, including viruses, collected over a year.

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