A generic anti-spyware solution by access control list at kernel level

Abstract

Spyware refers to programs that steal the user information stored in the userÕs computer and transmit this information via the Internet to a designated home server without the user being aware of this transmission. Existing anti-spyware solutions are not generic and flexible. These solutions either check for the existence of known spyware or try to block the transmission of the private information at the packet level. In this paper, we propose a more generic and flexible anti-spyware solution by utilizing an access control list in kernel mode of the operating system. The major difference between our approach and the existing approaches is that instead of asking a guard to look for the theft (spyware) or control the exit of the computer (and hence giving the spyware enough time to hide the information to be transmitted), we put a guard besides the treasure (the private information) and carefully control the access to it in the kernel mode. We also show the details of an implementation that realizes our proposed solution.

On the insecurity of Personal Firewall

“…It attaches the caller's device object to a target device object, so those I/O requests to the target device are routed first to the attached device. By attaching a filter object on the top of every transport driver device object, a filter layer is virtually inserted between the TDI transport drivers and clients, which intercepts all calls to the transport drivers [10].…”

Trust, privacy, and legal protection in the use of software with surreptitiously installed operations: An empirical evaluation

“…To investigate the factors affecting internet users' adoption of an anti-spyware system, a model, based on Anti-spyware software solutions (Chow et al 2005) Management and policy for spyware (Warkentin et al 2005) Factors affecting adoption of anti-spyware software (Lee and Kozar 2005) Detection procedures and countermeasures (Forte 2005) the theory of planned behavior (TPB) and previous studies of IT innovation adoption, was formulated (Lee and Kozar 2005). A field survey was undertaken to validate the research model.…”

A Holistic Approach for Managing Spyware

“…In addition to data theft, hacking, zombie attack, and network damage are also of great danger to business organizations. Despite the technological endeavors made toward the mitigation of spyware pervasion [6], the infection rate keeps skyrocketing per se. For this serious scenario magnified in the business domain, a mere technical effort, such as relying on antispyware software, cannot radically and sufficiently thwart the rapid spyware penetration.…”

“…For this serious scenario magnified in the business domain, a mere technical effort, such as relying on antispyware software, cannot radically and sufficiently thwart the rapid spyware penetration. The most recent spyware research only shed light on spyware identification and elimination in the arena of information security defense [1,[5][6][7][8][9], leaving managerial efforts relatively unnoticed. The limited spectrum of research agenda therefore needs to be further broadened and proactively revamped.…”