one of the erroneous ideas i sometimes come across is that av vendors are a little like drug pushers - that they want to keep you the user addicted or otherwise dependent on signature updates because charging you for regular signature updates is the only way they can make money.
this notion is complete, uninformed bullshit.
the first problem with this idea is the money aspect - if you haven't noticed, the major av vendors come out with a new version of their products (not just new signature updates) every year, not unlike microsoft comes out with a new version of ms office every few years. you have to pay microsoft to upgrade your ms office installation so it shouldn't take a rocket scientist to realize that av vendors make money the same way. they also make money from those who just renew at the end of the year instead of buying the new version because the signature and engine updates cost money to develop.
now you might think that just plays into a more fundamental issue, that they're purposefully adhering to a technology that requires updates/upgrades so that you need to pay each year but that's also nonsense. both the threat landscape and the operating environment itself are constantly changing, there's no protective technology that won't require updating to accommodate that fact. furthermore, there are always improvements that can be made to the way a security product (any security product) does it's job - the only way to get those improvements out to people is in the form of updates/upgrades, and the only way to pay for the research and development behind those improvements is to charge somebody money and it's only fair that the people they charge for the improvements are the people who benefit from those improvements.
still think they're intentionally dragging their feet with regards to non-signature-based technologies for some reason? fine, lets look at our old friend thunderbyte anti-virus. thunderbyte was an anti-virus suite back in the early 90's before av suites were even heard of. it had the signature based scanner, sure, but it also had the most transparent heuristic engine (by which i mean it told you what properties a file had that made it suspicious) i'd ever seen (then or since), it had rudimentary application whitelisting, it had behaviour blocking, it had integrity-based generic detection and cleaning. thunderbyte even marketed av hardware. the folks at thunderbyte were pioneers who in a very real sense built a better mouse trap and believe it or not the world did not beat a path to their door. the product was ultimately a failure in the market (their technology was bought by norman data defense which, with all due respect to the folks at norman, is a much more obscure company), not because it wasn't a superior product (it was), nor because it was too much of a niche product (it was readily available in computer stores where i live despite coming from a different continent and i imagine it was available in stores elsewhere as well), but because the market wasn't ready for it. just because you build it doesn't mean they will come - it might work like that in the movies but not in real life. it would be unreasonable to expect other vendors to waste their money developing technology that the market wasn't already clamouring for - the reason vendors have been slow to develop these alternative technologies is because the market for those technologies has been slow to develop. there weren't enough customers demanding the technology for it's development to make good business sense.
Showing posts with label thunderbyte. Show all posts
Showing posts with label thunderbyte. Show all posts
Friday, November 27, 2009
Monday, January 22, 2007
anti-virus is not a faulty burglar alarm
wow, what a great analogy robin bloor makes here... too bad it's his reasoning that is faulty...
one of my favourite turns of phrase lately is mismatched expectations - robin bloor is quite clearly suffering from mismatched expectation by likening anti-virus to a faulty burglar alarm... anti-virus is nothing like a burglar alarm, faulty or otherwise, nor is the problem it is trying to solve amenable to a burglar alarm type of approach...
burglar alarms are pretty simple things - you have one or more sensors that detect basic, easily quantifiable environmental conditions (broken window, open door, motion, etc) and an alarm goes off when the sensor is triggered... this is pretty dumb, all things considered, but it works well enough when the thing you're trying to detect can be broken down to such simple events and even better when the home owner can easily decide whether something is a false alarm...
the malware problem, by comparison, cannot be broken down into simple elements quite so easily and end users are largely incapable of deciding whether an alarm from a malware detector is false or not... this is why behavioural detection techniques (which have been around for over a decade) are still not receiving the same kind of mainstream attention that known-virus scanning receives... instead of going the burglar alarm route, anti-virus incorporates a considerable amount of knowledge about the viruses (now more generally, malware) that the vendor has seen in order to minimize false alarms... anti-virus still has false alarms, of course, but just imagine how bad it would be if av were made to be as dumb as a burglar alarm... if we're going to stick to crime-related analogies, anti-virus is really much more like the criminal databases that have proven so useful in the past to keep known felons out of places they're not supposed to go or out of job positions they shouldn't have... not that those databases are perfect, but they sure do help...
of course, bad analogies are not the only thing robin has up his sleeve in that article... he spreads some clever FUD about the malware pandemic using carefully selected figures from a microsoft study i wrote about once before... yes, the malicious software removal tool removed malware from 5.7 million computers, but what robin fails to tell you is that it scanned over 270 million computers... that gives a malware penetration just 2.1% - hardly a pandemic...
all this is to build up to his conclusion that application whitelisting is a superior technology that should be used in place of anti-virus... maybe it is superior, maybe it isn't, it depends on things i've mentioned elsewhere, specifically whether the user can accurately decide what is safe to add to the whitelist and whether the whitelist can cover enough of the various types of program execution (it's not just *.exe's out there)... should whitelisting be used in place of blacklisting (anti-virus)? no, in reality blacklists and whitelists complement each other, they partially mitigate each others weaknesses, so they really ought to be used together...
and just as a point of correction - contrary to mr. bloor's assertion, application whitelisting is not relatively new... the basic idea dates back at least a decade as an anti-virus (gasp!) suite known as thunderbyte anti-virus included a rudimentary form of whitelisting in it's tbcheck module... tbav was a fairly well known product in it's day and there was plenty of opportunity for whitelisting to become popular, but it didn't... others have languished in obscurity too... anti-virus seems to have remained the most popular in part because it required the least amount of knowledge and/or thinking from the end user - and when it comes to malware, that can actually be a very good thing...
one of my favourite turns of phrase lately is mismatched expectations - robin bloor is quite clearly suffering from mismatched expectation by likening anti-virus to a faulty burglar alarm... anti-virus is nothing like a burglar alarm, faulty or otherwise, nor is the problem it is trying to solve amenable to a burglar alarm type of approach...
burglar alarms are pretty simple things - you have one or more sensors that detect basic, easily quantifiable environmental conditions (broken window, open door, motion, etc) and an alarm goes off when the sensor is triggered... this is pretty dumb, all things considered, but it works well enough when the thing you're trying to detect can be broken down to such simple events and even better when the home owner can easily decide whether something is a false alarm...
the malware problem, by comparison, cannot be broken down into simple elements quite so easily and end users are largely incapable of deciding whether an alarm from a malware detector is false or not... this is why behavioural detection techniques (which have been around for over a decade) are still not receiving the same kind of mainstream attention that known-virus scanning receives... instead of going the burglar alarm route, anti-virus incorporates a considerable amount of knowledge about the viruses (now more generally, malware) that the vendor has seen in order to minimize false alarms... anti-virus still has false alarms, of course, but just imagine how bad it would be if av were made to be as dumb as a burglar alarm... if we're going to stick to crime-related analogies, anti-virus is really much more like the criminal databases that have proven so useful in the past to keep known felons out of places they're not supposed to go or out of job positions they shouldn't have... not that those databases are perfect, but they sure do help...
of course, bad analogies are not the only thing robin has up his sleeve in that article... he spreads some clever FUD about the malware pandemic using carefully selected figures from a microsoft study i wrote about once before... yes, the malicious software removal tool removed malware from 5.7 million computers, but what robin fails to tell you is that it scanned over 270 million computers... that gives a malware penetration just 2.1% - hardly a pandemic...
all this is to build up to his conclusion that application whitelisting is a superior technology that should be used in place of anti-virus... maybe it is superior, maybe it isn't, it depends on things i've mentioned elsewhere, specifically whether the user can accurately decide what is safe to add to the whitelist and whether the whitelist can cover enough of the various types of program execution (it's not just *.exe's out there)... should whitelisting be used in place of blacklisting (anti-virus)? no, in reality blacklists and whitelists complement each other, they partially mitigate each others weaknesses, so they really ought to be used together...
and just as a point of correction - contrary to mr. bloor's assertion, application whitelisting is not relatively new... the basic idea dates back at least a decade as an anti-virus (gasp!) suite known as thunderbyte anti-virus included a rudimentary form of whitelisting in it's tbcheck module... tbav was a fairly well known product in it's day and there was plenty of opportunity for whitelisting to become popular, but it didn't... others have languished in obscurity too... anti-virus seems to have remained the most popular in part because it required the least amount of knowledge and/or thinking from the end user - and when it comes to malware, that can actually be a very good thing...
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