An alternative approach to malware research
Christopher J. May · UNI ScholarWorks (University of Northern Iowa) · 2020
Current antivirus programs have design flaws that allow malware to bypass detection. Despite this, malicious parties are usually the ones to find and exploit these flaws before they can be fixed. Therefore, a more proactive approach to malware research should become the new standard. To that end, a new programming language will be designed and created that sheds light on a couple of design flaws in current antivirus models. Fundamentally, antivirus programs have trouble detecting interpreted languages. In addition, it is suspected that antivirus programs are unable to detect an unknown programming language that is injected into another file thus creating polyglot code. The Jaws programming language has been designed to exploit both of these weaknesses, and its implementation proves that such a language can exist.