Avfs: An On-Access Anti-Virus File System

Overview

Viruses and other malicious programs are an ever-increasing threat to current computer systems. They can cause serious damage and consume countless hours of system administrators' time to combat. Most current virus scanners perform scanning only when a le is opened, closed, or executed. Such scanners are inefficient because they scan more data than is needed. Worse, scanning on close may detect a virus after it had already been written to stable storage, opening a window for the virus to spread before detection. A true on-access anti-virus file system is developed called as Avfs that incrementally scans les and prevents infected data from being committed to disk.