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Published in:
2011 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
Simulating Malicious Users in a Software Reputation System
Authors : Anton Borg, Martin Boldt, Bengt Carlsson
Published in: Secure and Trust Computing, Data Management and Applications
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
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Today, computer users have trouble in separating malicious and legitimate software. Traditional countermeasures such as anti-virus tools mainly protect against truly malicious programs, but the situation is complicated due to a ”grey-zone” of questionable programs that are difficult to classify. We therefore suggest a software reputation system (SRS) to help computer users in separating legitimate software from its counterparts. In this paper we simulate the usage of a SRS to investigate the effects that malicious users have on the system. Our results show that malicious users will have little impact on the overall system, if kept within 10% of the population. However, a coordinated attack against a selected subset of the applications may distort the reputation of these applications. The results also show that there are ways to detect attack attempts in an early stage. Our conclusion is that a SRS could be used as a decision support system to protect against questionable software.