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AS OF 12/3/2008 11:40PM EST

Researchers Eye the Cloud for Combating Malware
By Michelle Savage

August 12, 2008 — Will a cloud computing approach to anti-virus protection make traditional anti-virus software a thing of the past? Researchers at the University of Michigan believe it will.

The researchers have created CloudAV, a cloud computing service that detects malicious software. Unlike today’s anti-virus software solutions, which are installed on millions of individual computers, CloudAV is delivered as a network service.

The researchers say the cloud approach is much more effective than traditional software solutions for a couple of reasons. First, there’s no lag time between when a threat surfaces and when the anti-virus solution is updated to fight that threat. In addition, the service detects more malicious software than traditional software by using N-version programming techniques, which tap numerous software implementations to ensure service reliability.

CloudAV uses several anti-virus engines, including Avast, AVG, BitDefender, ClamAV, F-Prot, F-Secure, Kaspersky, McAfee, Symantec and Trend Micro, all of which act together to tell the inquiring computer whether the item is safe to open.

Traditional anti-virus software solutions use only one anti-virus detector at a time, which the researchers say is an ineffective approach. In one study, they observed malware—malicious software—detection rates as low as 35 percent against the most recent threats and an average window of vulnerability exceeding 48 days. That means new threats went undetected for an average of seven weeks. The computer scientists also found severe vulnerabilities in the anti-virus engines themselves.

“Anti-virus engines have complementary detection capabilities, and a combination of many different engines can improve the overall identification of malicious and unwanted software,” CloudAV’s Jon Oberheide, Evan Cooke and Farnam Jahanian stated in a report.

CloudAV claims a 98 percent malware detection rate, compared with 83 percent for a single detection engine.

Related Search Term(s): cloud computing, security

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