avast! antivirus engine for OEMs

Scanning kernel

The latest version of avast! antivirus kernel features excellent detection capabilities, combined with high performance (data throughput). You can expect 100% detection of ITW viruses/worms (In-The-Wild, those viruses already spreading amongst end user) and excellent detection of Trojan horses.

The kernel is certified by ICSA and frequently takes part in the tests of Virus Bulletin magazine, yielding the VB100% award multiple times.

Scanning of archives

avast! kernel has extensive support for archives (compressed files). The kernel supports selected EXE-packers, TAR, GZIP, BZIP2, ZOO, ZIP, RAR, ARJ, ARC, ACE and all MIME forms, all that including SFX versions. Additionally, the Windows version supports CAB and NTFS streams. All archives are scanned recursively, i.e. even files inside of nested archives are tested.

Updates

A key risk to your antivirus strategy is that of out-of-date antivirus products; avast! gets around this by implementing automatic updates, both of the virus database and of the program itself. All avast! updates are incremental, so that only new (or changed) data are downloaded, thus reducing the amount of transferred data significantly. The typical size of virus database updates are tens of KB, with program updates usually in the hundreds of KB range. This way it is possible to perform the updates more often, and so more efficient than in other similar products.

However, we offer a further possibility: "PUSH" updates. "PUSH" updates are a dramatic change in the philosophy of updates. Usually, every installed program checks periodically whether a new version is available. PUSH updates, however, are initialized by our server; they result in the target computer (with avast! engine installed) quickly responding and performing the necessary update. The system is based on the SMTP protocol (such as that used for e-mail messages). The host program has to provide the necessary support for such messages; however, it can use avast! library functions that make it rather easy.

The whole system is protected by asymmetric ciphers and is resistant to unauthorized misuse.

Supported platforms

avast! engine is available both for Microsoft Windows environments (Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP/2003/2008), and for the Linux environment (i386 only, for kernels 2.2 and higher). The detection capabilities are identical on both platforms.

Using in mail servers

avast! kernel features full support for "MIME archives", i.e. it is able to scan the content of structured messages, used especially in electronic mail. avast! has paid particular attention to the MIME module, since (even though the MIME format specification is quite strict) there are many (commercially successful) e-mail clients that can interpret an invalid MIME file; unfortunately, such a "feature" is often misused by viruses that are able to pass through antivirus checks at the gateway and arrive at the client computer.

avast! MIME module has been heavily tested and it was found capable of detecting viruses even in these kind of messages.