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  • Advanced Adaptive Applications (A3) Software Auto-Repairs Malware Damage

    Ankita Katdare

    Administrator

    Updated: Oct 26, 2024
    Views: 1.7K
    Broadly speaking, thousands of us own computers that have been affected by malware and viruses from time to time. The prevent and repair mechanisms we use are based on a pre-defined set of known viruses that could affect our machines. The anti-virus programs browse and compare the catalog of these viruses and detects if it matches with the new strange behavior in our machine to send an alert to the user about the infection. This means that there's no way to completely avoid the malware from knocking at our door step. Well, recently what the team of computer researchers from University of Utah has achieved, could solve this problem to a great extent.

    A software known as A3 or Advanced Adaptive Applications is known to not only detect and remove the yet-unknown or newly-generated malware and viruses, but also auto-repair the damage they've caused and even prevent them from infecting the same machine ever again. That's amazing. The A3 software suite was designed & co-developed by Raytheon BBN, a Massachusetts-based defense contractor and funded by DARPA's Clean-Slate Design of Resilient, Adaptive, Secure Hosts program in a span of 4 years. The software can monitor a virtual machine's OS and apps and protect the servers or business-level computers running on Linux OS.

    university-of-utah-self-repairing-software-advanced-adapative-applications-a3
    Eric Eide, University of Utah research assistant professor
    of computer science, who leads this research project.​

    The University of Utha researchers created "stackable debuggers" that are nothing but multiple de-bugging applications that run on top of each other, placed there to detect any out-of-the-ordinary behavior in the machine. Initially their design goal was to protect the mission-critical software used by the military and enhance their cyber security in general and there were no plans to adapt the A3 system in home laptops and computers. But now, the team at Utah believes that if the A3 technologies are in fact made available as consumer products, we could fast curb the fast-spreading of malware and thus protect thousands of machines.

    Imagine a scenario where a web service like Amazon gets attacked by a virus. With A3 in place, the affected areas of their servers could be repaired within minutes and there would be no need for the service experiencing down-time. The team showcased the effectiveness of the Advanced Adaptive Applications by demonstrating how A3 could tackle <a href="https://www.crazyengineers.com/threads/yahoo-servers-hacked-using-shellshock-flaw-company-claims-no-data-stolen.76897">Yahoo! Servers Hacked Using Shellshock Flaw, Company Claims No Data Stolen</a> (the flaw that was used to attacked Yahoo! servers recently) and repair the damage it causes in less than 4 minutes. The team went on to show how A3 could pick any 'Bug of the Week' and detect it.

    Another good news is that the A3 software is open source and can massive applications in cloud computing technologies. You can read more about the A3 system in the source link and let us know your thoughts about the new technology via your comments below.

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