Rethinking Antivirus: Executable Analysis in the Network Cloud

Antivirus software installed on each end host in an organization has become the de-facto security mechanism used to defend against unwanted executables. We argue that the executable analysis currently provided by hostbased antivirus software can be more efficiently and effectively provided as an in-cloud network service. Instead of running complex analysis software on every end host, we suggest that each end host run a lightweight process to acquire executables entering a system, send them into the network for analysis, and then run or quarantine them based on a threat report returned by the network service. An executable analysis service run inside an enterprise network or by a service provider could integrate antivirus software, behavioral simulation, and other analysis engines from multiple vendors providing better detection of malware and simplify client software enabling deployment on a broader range of devices. To explore this idea we construct a prototype composed of a Windows based host agent and an in-cloud analysis service and evaluate it using a diverse dataset of 5066 unique malicious executables. By correlating information between multiple detection engines, our system provides over 98% detection coverage of the malicious executables using eight antivirus engines and two behavioral engines compared to a 54% to 86% detection rate using the latest commercial antivirus products.