Just heard about this on BBC radio this AM

from http://www.vnunet.com/Features/1141408
Case study: Avecho
Here's a brash statement from a UK start-up only 15-months-old, with 14 people based in Colchester, which will not be in profit until the second quarter of 2004: Avecho's GlassWall software will provide 'absolute' protection from email viruses and hacking attempts.
But co-founder, chief executive and chief technology officer Nick Scales, co-founder and sales director Paul Ridge, and marketing director Chris Dye are not the latest version of snake-oil salesmen, the vendors of the perpetual motion machine. Avecho has patents for its core technology.
It does not tell people how the software works. And it wouldn't want to fight three years in a patent court at £1m a month to defend its intellectual property, says Scales.
It is careful not to divulge the inner working of GlassWall until it has firm non-disclosure agreements.

they also mentioned a £10,000 reward to anyone who can get a virus past it. It reportedly does not use virus definitions or analyze for virus-like behavior and needs no updates. It would be very interesting to see how this code works. Text mail only? LOL

2nEw

"The downside, says Twiss, is that about one per cent of legitimate emails may be quarantined, held back rather than let through."

That's quite poor.

I'm interested to know what they're doing though since it's not based on signatures or heuristics.

I was wondering the same thing. It is probable that they are not being honest.
Who can blame them, they want the money before they tell anyone anything.

What happens if you sign a confidentiality agreement with some company and they disect your software and decide they dont like it ?

I'm just wondering aloud

Woodmann

It could be a setup as follows

When you launch an email client it actually runs a emulator that thinks that it is the only software running on that machine. Any infections etc will not harm the main machine and you can secure the main machine by not allowing any networking / internet via the main machine.

Internet browser would also run in a emulator mode thereby protecting the main system again.

Then all you are doing is looking into emulator (similar to terminal servers)

Ok I'm bored
peterg70

Here's a thought...

A proposed addition to the USA PATRIOT act would require publicly traded companies to work with regulatory companies to ensure compliance in prevention of "cyber attacks".

This is, of course, put in to benefit a few consulting firms (some of which owned by people in very high places).

So, if you had a company that had a "solution" for all these consulting firms to install, voila!

Now lets say you had NO solution, but you still wanted money. You could SAY you had a solution that every rich company was going to be needing real soon (for compliance), and voila, you'll have venture capitalists clamoring at their brokerage houses for a piece of the action. And you never have to deliver anything.

As people who know the insides of software and hardware, we KNOW there is no true black box solution. But they say "a fool and his money are soon parted", and I think that really applies here.

It's the "American way". It seems everyone wants to "Get in on the ground floor" for the next Perpetual Motion Machine. The UnCrackable program. The EVIL bit.

Seriously, the best way to do it is either go back to old paper based mail (oh no! it's ANTHRAX!!!) or solely ASCII based E-Mail with fixed lengths to avoid any chance of buffer overruns.

Or delete JScript and VB Script, and teach people not to double click on stuff...

Nice thoughts, but some people can't resist to double click ...

(I can... but others )

I think I'm gonna write some letters on the old good paper...
... sounds wonderfull, but didn't you use a pen or something for that ?
It's such a time ago ... (btw where do you have to put the powder ?)

MiniMind

good idea, but then you can't send/save email attachments from/to your host system

What if you place the attachments in some Demilitarized Zone, where both the system and the emulator have access?

Ahh but if you stored everything on an exchange server etc you wouldn't need anything on the host machine. And you wouldn't be able to execute programs on the server.

then you're not really stopping viruses, are you?

besides, guys, it doesn't work this way. the creators said that it does quarantining, which wouldn't come into play with this emulation idea