Self-Healing Software On The Way

Researchers at the University of Utah have developed self-healing software that detects, expunges and protects against malware in virtual machines.

Called Advanced Adaptive Applications (A3), the software suite was created in collaboration with US defence contractor Raytheon BBN over a period of four years.

It was funded by DARPA through its Clean-Slate Design of Resilient, Adaptive, Secure Hosts programme, and was completed in September, Science Daily reported on Thursday.

A3 features “stackable debuggers”, a number of debugging applications that cooperate to monitor virtual machines for indications of unusual behaviour.

Instead of checking computer object code against a catalogue of known viruses and other malware, the A3 software suite can detect the operation of malicious code heuristically, based on the types of function it attempts.

Once the A3 software detects malicious code, it can apparently suspend the offending process or thread – stopping it in its tracks – repair the damage and remove it from the virtual machine environment, and learn to recognise that piece of malware to prevent it entering the system again.

The self-healing software was developed for military applications to support cyber security for mission-critical systems, but it could also be useful in commercial web hosting and cloud computing operations.

If malware gets into such systems, A3 software could detect and repair the attack within minutes.

The university and Raytheon demonstrated the A3 software suite to DARPA in September by testing it against the notorious Shellshock exploit known as the Bash Bug.

A3 detected and repaired the Shellshock attack on a web server within four minutes. The project team also tested A3 successfully on another six examples of malware.

Eric Eide, the research associate professor of computer science who led the A3 project team along with computer science associate professor John Regehr, said: “It’s pretty cool when you can pick the Bug of the Week and it works.”

The A3 self-healing software suite is open source, so it’s free for anyone to use, and the university researchers would like to extend its applicability to cloud computing environments and, perhaps eventually, end-user computing.

Professor Eide said: “A3 technologies could find their way into consumer products someday, which would help consumer devices protect themselves against fast-spreading malware or internal corruption of software components. But we haven’t tried those experiments yet.”

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