Kaspersky Patents Hardware-Based Antivirus

just so we're clear here, you're now accepting that bad patents can and do get granted? that your earlier claim that something has to be proven new in order to be granted a patent was 'overzealous'? and that jab you made at the rest of us concerning our knowledge of us patent law may have been premature?

because i'm thinking of technology that is now nearly 20 years old so the timeline is very clear.

you're oversimplifying things. common knowledge? since when is anything in this field common knowledge? it's only common knowledge within this field, and then generally only to those who've been around for the past 20 years. that will, in all likelihood, exclude the patent examiner, so there's nothing really getting in the way of this bad patent getting granted.

symantec has never shown any particular interest in going down this road so there's little or no motivation for them to get in the way of others who chose to. besides, symantec is the same company whose CEO said the malware problem was already solved. their primary innovations these days are acquisitions and marketing.

in point of fact, thunderbyte is the only other company i've ever heard of that tried to go the hardware av route, and they vanished over a decade ago, so in all likelihood no one else in the industry is interested in getting in kaspersky's way. they don't care if kaspersky patents the idea because they have no plans to enter that arena themselves and thus no reason to interfere with kaspersky's competitive advantage, however illegitimate it might be.

 

yes of course you are correct:-none of Kasperskys competitors have any interest in not allowing them to gain a commercial or even perhaps a technical advantage over them using ideas that they have "stolen":-get real please!

 

an advantage in a field those competitors don't intend to enter themselves? certainly they'll ignore it. fighting it costs money, and if they don't intend to get into the hardware av market themselves, that would be money they would not recoup.

 

no they wouldn't ignore it:-if they can stop a competitor developing anything,even if they have no interest in entering that field,they would do so:-the last thing a company like symantec is is charitable to competition!If they can screw up a competitors plans they will

 

there's something you don't quite seem to be grasping - if no one else is getting into the hardware av market (and they've had plenty of time to try) then whether kaspersky gets a patent or not is meaningless from a business perspective. it confers no real competitive advantage because they have no competition in that market.

the only competitive advantage a patent can confer is to prevent your competition from copying your idea. without competition the patent is nothing more than a formality and fighting it does nothing to impede the patent holder's business or market dominance.

if and when someone else decides to get into that market, then we will likely see the patent challenged, but not before then.

 

I don't think your grasping anything at all:-they would block it if they could just in case it led to kaspersky developing a solution that could render all other types of anti malware product obsolete,lets face it symantec and the rest were worried enough about market share when MS entered the market,and they weren't developing anything radically different from what was the current type of product,this is a radicaly different approach which may or may not yield the results that kaspersky hope it will but companies like symantec will not sit idly by and let any of their cometitors steal a march on them if it is within their powers to actually stop this line of research by them

 

they wouldn't block it because they already know that's not going to happen. it didn't happen the last time and it won't happen this time.

and that's precisely why they were worried. MS was entering the same market they were in and so MS represented competition. kaspersky is expanding into a market that no one else is in (probably because they don't believe there's a real market there) so nobody cares.

symantec cannot stop the research - what are you on about? at best the can contest the patent, but they can't stop kaspersky from doing research or bringing a product to market. the only thing anyone can do is stop kaspersky from keeping other people out of the market - and since no one else wants in right now, no one is bothering with kaspersky's patent.

 

it happened with the magnetic field amplifiers:-yamaha "pinched" somebodies radical idea,they were taken to task and had to stop producing them and had to pay substantial damages,thing is nobody else apart from yamaha was producing them at the time so really inline with your thinking nobody should have bothered trying to stop them
Maybe somebody like Symantec is waiting and hoping Kaspersky will invest a large amount of money into this,after which they may challenge them,win case and be given access to the results of the reserch as part of some deal with kaspersky?so they get the tech without the work!

 

frankly, no, not in line with what i'm talking about. your example involves the patent holder being outside of the market and stopping the sole entity inside the market. in the hardware av case, the sole entity in the market and the patent holder are one and the same.

once someone other than the patent holder wishes to enter the hardware av market, then and only then will anyone bother with trying to contest the patent. you gain no benefit by contesting a patent in a market you aren't in, and you do no damage to the patent holder when they're the only ones who want to be in that market.

that's not how it works at all. there is no "case", contesting the validity of a patent goes through the patent office, not the courts, and nobody magically gets access to the patent holders work as a result.

 

Indeed. If, in the highly unlikely event that Kaspersky’s patent proves to be troublesome to Symantec, then they will likely buy the entire Kasperksy enterprise, fold the best parts of it into their own offerings, and discard the remainder.

 

And, thinking about hardware approaches to protection on the PC in general, I wonder what became of the Yoggie Pico Personal?

 

~~Use Linux~~

No need of Antivirus...no more investments in security apps...long lasting freedom from the hardware thingy.
Windows Potential, Linux passion.

 

If it was as compatible - and I'm not just talking about games - I'd so run it. In fact, I've it installed, but I never use it, because it's even incompatible with websites that I browse and doesn't act like I want.

 

riiiight - because there's no malware for linux.

it's not like rootkits originated in the unix world or anything - oh wait, yes they did.

 

you know this guy,kwismer,knows so much,more than most av companies:-even historical data of past products that have been tried that obviously the competing av companies know nothing about it seems,I'm very surprised he isn't marketing his own"far superior to anything else"anti virus/anti malware product,so many experts so little knowledge

 

actually i think av companies know exactly what i do, that's why the idea of hardware av sat dormant for so long. some ideas just weren't meant to be.

 

Well, "someone" said that their is no "unix' in "linux"

 

perhaps the technology available is slightly more advanced now than it used to be and perhaps the people at kaspersky do actually know what they are doing,just perhaps and I know this is very unlikely,they know more than you?:-I know that last assumption is very unlikely,how can they know more than somebody who knows everthing there is to know regarding this?
PS:-However, it's important to remember that even though Windows rootkits have inherited the name ‘rootkits’ from the Unix world, Windows malware of this type is directly descended from DOS stealth viruses, not UNIX rootkits.(from viruslist.com)its just the name they inherited from unix!

 

I just wanna say some tidbits of info about ThunderByte because people might think that the company that developed it vanished because of developing hardware-based av.

Thunderbyte is the product of ESaSS, a company founded in 1988. NORMAN Data Defense System (now known as NORMAN ASA, the developers of Norman Security Suite) bought Thunderbyte in 1995. It is unlike the av that kaspersky got a patent because it doesnt have a cpu and ram of its own. It is an add-on card with an erasable programmable read only memory chip (Eprom) where the software was written.

Thunderbyte was discontinued in the early years of the company because their traditional virus scanner, TbScan, is selling much better.

ESaSS also developed ThunderByte Anti Virus (TBAV) which had good reviews and was also bought by NORMAN ASA in 1998. It was one of the first AV softwares bundled together or "av suites" released and also one of the first that use heuristics scanning.

 

in the sense that no unix source code is in the linux kernel, that would be correct, but in many other respects linux and unix can be considered equivalent.

oh, absolutely, that is not what happened to them at all. they were pioneers and their products ahead of their time in a lot of ways. they built the better mousetrap with their software av but unfortunately the world did not beat a path to their door and they were bought out by norman, as you said.

that difference has more to do with embedded development becoming a dying art. the closer a device gets to being an analog to a traditional computer, the easier it is to find people to develop it.

actually processing power isn't the primary problem with a hardware-based solution.

the supposed purpose of embedding av into hardware is so that once a system becomes compromised the av can still operate without interference from the malware - prior to compromise, software-only tools work just fine. the fact is there were and are other, cheaper, and more flexible options for dealing with a compromised (or even just suspected compromised) system. specifically booting from external read-only media for the purposes of scanning (or whatever else you want to do in your outside-the-box analysis). back then this was done with bootable floppy disks with scanners on them, now there are bootable cd options provided by a number of vendors (and i seem to recall kaspersky is one of them).

kaspersky's hardware product may lend itself more easily to update than thunderbyte's but the only benefit either have over the clean-boot option is not needing to reboot.

oh, believe me, i know how different unix and windows 'rootkits' are:
http://anti-virus-rants.blogspot.com/2006/02/what-is-rootkit.html
http://anti-virus-rants.blogspot.com/2006/02/descent-of-rootkits_20.html
http://anti-virus-rants.blogspot.com/2006/04/whats-stealthkit.html

 

The headline I'm waiting for is:

Intel Patents and Produces a Hardware /Chip based Operating System

That is the day the 3rd party vendors dread.

 

If you know difference between unix and windows based rootkits why bring them up??they are totally unrelated to each other
when can we expect your own patented better than anything on the market anti malware suite?a man of your knowledge and abilities should be able to knock it together over a weekend don't you think?Are you the guy all the av companies come to for advice when they are unable to figure out asolution to a problem?

 

i brought up *nix rootkits in response to someone stating that we should just use linux and then we wouldn't need anti-virus products anymore. since there's malware for the *nix platform, therefore his conclusion is false.

i didn't bring up windows 'rootkits', however, only the *nix ones.

when can we expect you to stop trolling and/or making the argument personal? when i say that symantec actually has come to me for advice?
(not on a technical matter, mind you, but still)

 

not trolling just that you seem to think nobody,not even the av developers,know as much about what they are doing as you do,like I said earlier too many experts too little knowledge,do you actually think the likes of Kaspersky know less about this than you??