Microsoft Patents 'Proactive' Virus Protection

An anonymous reader writes "InfoWeek blogger Alex Wolfe wonders whether Microsoft will go after McAfee, Symantec, Trend Micro, and Kaspersky for software royalties for proactive virus protection software. The technique enables security software to protect a PC against malware which isn't yet in the antivirus definition file, by comparing whether the new malware is similar to an old virus. Wolfe reports that Microsoft has been awarded U.S. patent 7,376,970 for "System and method for proactive computer virus protection," but that McAfee, Symantec, Trend Micro, and Kaspersky have all been selling products implementing proactive virus protection for years before Microsoft even filed for the patent. Writes Wolfe: "One often wonders about software patents. I sure wonder about this one. I also wonder whether McAfee, Symantec, Trend Micro, and Kaspersky are also going to be hearing from their friends in Redmond real soon"."

Comments

Might not be a totally bad patent?

[Tridus]

From deeper in the patent: "In accordance with the invention, a virtual operating environment for simulating the execution of programs to determine if the programs are malware is created. The virtual operating environment confines potential malware so that the systems of the host operating environment will not be adversely effected during simulation. As a program is being simulated, a set of behavior signatures is generated. The collected behavior signatures are suitable for analysis to determine if the program is malware."

So it looks like what its actually doing is letting the virus run in a virtual environment, watching it, then using heuristics to say "yep, thats probably a virus."

The question on the patents validity becomes not if someone else has done "proactive" virus protection, but if they did it the same way. AFAIK Mcafee's stuff just watches the program while its actually running and says "hey this thing emailing itself to all your friends might be a virus." Thats similar, but patent-wise not actually the same thing.

(Not that I like software patents or anything, but the "patents suck" line of comments will be covered by 500 other people.)

Not necessarily any prior art

[mollymoo]

Jesus, does nobody on this fucking planet understand patents? Microsoft have not and can not patent "proactive virus protection". They have patented a particular method of performing it. If it is novel (ie. not the same method as that used by the AV vendors) it won't impact the AV vendors, they can just carry on using whatever they use now. If the AV vendors do use the same method but chose to keep their methods a trade secret then, well, I guess they should have patented it when they had the chance.

Re:Prior art

[morgan_greywolf]

It is their DUTY to release that kind of thing FREE as they all deal with fixing their own products flaws.

Or, more correctly, their software shouldn't be so exploitable.

If Microsoft really wants to release a great OS product for Windows V8, they need stop worrying about vendor lock-in, "checklist features", DRM, eye candy, and other useless stuff that they focused on for Vista and focus all of their attention on making the OS secure. Start from the ground up if they need to.

In the end, anti-virus protection should be more about system integrity checking and less about pattern matching for known viruses.

Then again, they've never done that before, so why should we expect them to start now?

Read the claims first...

[PatentMagus]

If you want to know what is being patented, read the claims first. The claims tell you exactly what is patented. Pick apart the abstract or detailed description is mere wankery without first dissecting the claims. For example: Claim 1: A computer-implementable method for determining the behavior of an executable comprising: selecting evaluation calls made by the executable to the interface of an operating system; loading stubs into a virtual address space, the stubs: mirroring the calls made to the interface of an operating system wherein mirroring the calls made to the interface of the operating system includes mirroring a set of full implemented DLLs; and determining a behavior signature for the selected calls; wherein the calls are included in dynamic link libraries (DLLs) and wherein loading stubs include loading stub DLLs into said virtual address space; executing the selected calls inside of a virtual operating environment using the loaded stubs dynamically linked libraries; and determining the behavior signatures resulting from said execution of the selected calls inside of a virtual operating environment. So, this is basically running some code inside a stubby VM. That is the prior art to look for. All the stuff about looking for code similar to already known malware is BS. It doesn't matter how long that has been done - it isn't prior art with regard to the claims.