RE: Extracting signature snippets from AV databases

 




>What I'm trying to figure out is how to 'smoke test' new builds, and to
ethically and fully demonstrate >(to the CEO, to outsiders) that the
protection works.  We're in alpha test, and beta is approaching fast.

What ethical dilemmas would come up from making sure your av is working
correctly?

-Daniel


-----Original Message-----
From: Nick FitzGerald [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Tuesday, May 09, 2006 3:54 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Extracting signature snippets from AV databases

Yuri Slobodyanyuk wrote:

> SideNote: few years ago I watched the heated dabate on some forum
(don't
> remember any details) where AV vendor representative was accusing 
> open-source AV developers of reverse-engineering the virus-signatures 
> instead of gathering their own, so logic says it has been done before 
> by someone.

Yes -- the Open AntiVirus group had a "signature extractor" that
basically took a sample of a piece of malware detected by a scanner then
successively munged it (overwriting various sized and location blocks
with nulls IIRC) until the scanner didn't detect it.  Applying this
approach from several starting points and iterating eventually gives you
a suitably small-ish  "chunk" of the original file that appears
necessary to its detection, at least relative to the specific scanner in
the harness.  Said "chunk" was then added to OAV's detection database.

For a dumb, brute-force string scanner like OAV's and for some simple
types of malware this can produce marginally useful "signatures", if
detection of relatively static objects (such as non-morphing malware,
which includes most self-mailers) is your objective.

It is probably even a defensible business model if you have no ethics.

However, taking such a "signature" and sticking it into an arbitrary
file at an arbitrary offset (as the OP is apparently planning on doing)
is not even guaranteed to trigger the original scanner such a
"signature" was extracted from, for reasons I mentioned in my earlier
post and also described by Robert Sandilands.

That the OP was apparently unaware of these basic issues and limitations
of his proposed approach is rather worrying, given he is the developer
of a security product.


--
Nick FitzGerald
Computer Virus Consulting Ltd.
Ph/FAX: +64 3 3267092



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