University of Applied Sciences Furtwangen, Germany Faculty of Computer Science - Computer Networking
Server-based Virus-protection On Unix/Linux
by Rainer Link
Advisor: Advisor: Finished: Public Release:
Prof. Hannelore Frank Prof. Dr. Rainer Mueller May, 28 2003 August, 2003
Preface
Abstract
Evaluation and development of server-based anti-virus solutions, running on Linux/Unix, using the Internet Content Adaption Protocol (ICAP). The diploma thesis covers proof-of-concept solutions for web proxy (Squid), eMail server (sendmail/postfix) and file server (Samba), with focus on the latter one aiming to provide a (fully-featured) product.
Motivation
On 07/21/1999, I sent the first patch to the maintainer of the AMaViS project (A Mail Virus Scanner, http://www.amavis.org/, GPL’ed1 ) fixing the AntiViral Toolkit Pro/Linux call. Since then - among other stuff - I wrote and maintained several anti-virus modules (and still do). So, with the help of other people, AMaViS supports a wide range of anti-virus products. But wouldn’t it be easier to maintain only one anti-virus module, implementing a common protocol, to support all those anti-virus scanners? Also, back in 1999, I was looking for an on-access virus scanning solution for Samba fileservers2 , receiving a first Linux kernel-based solution via email in June ’99. More than a year later, I came across the Samba Virtual File System (VFS)3 . A half year later, I digged into the Samba VFS and started to work on a small piece of code which eventually became the samba-vscan project: onaccess file scanning directly integrated into Samba (GPL’ed, too). As nearly all the code I wrote past years was put under an Open Source License, I decided to release this thesis under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
GNU General Public License, see http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html see e.g. http://www.geocrawler.com/archives/3/281/1999/4/0/1652065/ 3 see e.g.