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Kernel space: Virus scanning API spawns security debate

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Linux

The TALPA malware scanning API was covered in LWN in December, 2007. Several months later, TALPA is back - in the form of a patch set posted by a Red Hat employee. The resulting discussion has certainly not been what the TALPA developers would have hoped for; it is, instead, a good example of how a potentially useful idea can be set back by poor execution and presentation to the kernel community.

The idea behind TALPA is simple: various companies in the virus-scanning business would like a hook into the kernel which allows them to check for malware and prevent its spread. So the patch adds a hook into the VFS code which intercepts every file open operation. A series of filters can be attached to this intercept, with the most important one being a mechanism which makes the file being opened available to a user-space process as a read-only file descriptor. That process can scan the file and tell the kernel whether the open operation should be allowed to proceed or not. In this way, the scanning process can prevent any sort of access to files which are deemed to contain bits with evil intentions.

There are a few other details, of course. A caching mechanism prevents rescanning of unchanged files, increasing performance considerably.

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