International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887) Volume 39– No.11, February 2012 45 Artificial Hygiene for Computer Systems Ashu Sharma Department of Computer Science Anand Engineering College Agra – 282007 (India) Neha Singh Department of Computer Science College of Engineering Roorkee Roorkee-247667 (India) ABSTRACT Artificial Hygiene is the thought taken from the concept of hygiene in daily life. Hygiene is an old concept related to medical, as well as to personal and professional practices that are taken to be care related to most aspects of living. Hygiene practices that are employed as preventative measures to less incidence and spreading of disease, like hand hygiene cleaning the hands before taking food, respiratory hygiene covering the face with hands or hanky on sneezing, food and water hygiene-always put the food and drinking water covered, etc. so hygiene can also be applied on computer machines. So in Computer network, if a system in network is infected the artificial hygiene should ensure that unauthorized or malicious traffic never leaves the infected system/host to other in a network. Hygiene refers to the set of rules that an individual follows in a community to be associated with the preservation of healthy living for whole community that avoid or reduce disease and the spreading of disease in social society. Periodical hygienenical habits may be considered good practices by a society while the neglect of hygiene can be considered disgusting, disrespectful or even threatening. So for this we have to give some rules that an individual computer have to follow to impart hygiene to computers society that means computer network so that the system know how to behave against threat to protect itself as well as help others on the network so that other can also protect themselves from the threat. Keywords Antivirus, Digital society, Eradication, Hygiene, Malwares. 1. INTRODUCTION Artificial hygiene is the approach which prevents the infection to spread among the systems in the network. The infections in the system are due to malwares [5]. Integration of biological community helps to transfer infection from individual to society. Likewise, the computer systems are also connected with each other through networks which provide infection a platform to spread itself to other systems in that network, So for digital disease prevention, digital devices need to take care of both personal and public hygiene. Like, we cover our mouth while sneezing and coughing; in various countries, A law is implemented that an AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) patient contains the, „HIV‟ (Human Immuno Deficiency Virus) virus should require that the virus should be within himself or herself. These are all part of hygiene, which is a process of prevention of propagation of disease. In this work I introduce the philosophy of hygiene for digital systems. We call this philosophy “Artificial Hygiene” [1] (AH) for the digital society. Because it is only a digital device that can function as a carrier for digital virus, it must necessarily participate in the mechanism to prevent spread of viruses. Through AH, the device will prevent spread of digital viruses [3]. AH in a device will ensure that a computer protects itself from diseases, also ensure that it does not function as a carrier of a communicable disease as well as it will also alert others so they can also prevent themselves from that disease . Prof Asoke K Talukder has proposed Artificial Hygiene for email malwares in the paper “Artificial hygiene: a critical step towards safety from email viruses” [1], in which he classified the malwares into different categories and proposed a model which specify which malware lies in which category. He totally stick on email viruses and said nothing about the viruses from other medium. So I decided to work on implementing Artificial Hygiene for computer systems. In computer networking, artificial hygiene is to ensure that unauthorized or malicious traffic never leaves the infected system/host to other in a network. It‟s like some peoples in a group sitting at a restaurant and ordered tea for all. After waiter serve tea to every one and one of the person in the group randomly by taking a sip of tea, he realizes that milk in the tea is stale and the tea can make his colleagues sick. Then, what will he do after taking a sip of tea? Simply he will alert others that tea is stale and advice them to avoid it. So others will not take the tea which can make them sick. So same behavior I proposed for computer system. 2. ARTIFICIAL HYGIENE As we use anti viruses software‟s for prevention of malwares attack. Anti viruses are also capable of detecting and removal of malwares from the computer systems. They works on signature matching by which the software match the files signatures that are on the computer system to the stored malwares signatures that are in the data bases with the anti viruses. In digital world very high rate of development of malwares is going on, so static malwares bases do not works. That is why antivirus needs to update its virus base within a regular interval. Hence for complete prevention from malware a computer system should regularly update its anti virus base. Generally the antivirus development team provides a server that regularly generates the new malwares signatures and all the anti viruses updates their virus bases from this server, so by all this the antivirus works well. But what if:  A computer system not able to connect itself to the server.  Server itself not aware about the new malware for which one of the computer system is suffering. So if above condition occurs the systems become vulnerable. This problem can be removed if the individual computer system becomes capable to discover new malwares. But discovering all malwares for each system is very much tough task. Where we already having viruses banks that are regularly detected by various antivirus companies. So we have