Are you looking for ways to improve your IT security? If here is the application control you need to know.
Application Control You Need to Know
Application Control is the process of monitoring, analyzing, and restricting applications based on their behavior. It is the best way to delineate between the right and wrong application. The right application works in the right manner and anything outside of the pre-defined rules will be rejected and stopped.
There are different types of Application Control:
1. Behavior-Based Application Control
2. Signature Based Application Control
3. Static Binary Analysis (SBA)
4. Dynamic Binary Analysis (DBA)
Behavior-Based Application Control
Behavior-based application control is a technology that monitors and controls applications based on their behavior. It does not rely on static pattern matching or signatures but rather looks at the actual behavior of applications to make decisions for controlling them. The decision-making process is a result of the analysis of events and activities.
It can be logged about the application’s interaction with other components in the operating system. The process involves continuous monitoring of all activities using a monitor driver. Since this gathers relevant information from numerous sources, such as operating systems, security products, and antivirus software.
This is then processed by an engine that comes up with a single verdict. So, it is whether an application should be allowed or denied access to a particular resource. The behavior-based approach provides several advantages over other solution approaches.
These are such as a signature or static analysis. A primary advantage is its ability to identify unknown threats. That is while they are attempting to harm a system before they have been detected by antivirus software or even before they have been written!
This level of protection is critical in today’s threat climate where new attacks are being discovered every day. This is by security researchers and the bad guys who are trying to exploit those vulnerabilities for malicious gain. In addition, behavior-based solutions provide transparent protection against zero-day attacks.
This is as well as new variants of existing threats that have already been identified. Also, behavior-based solutions prevent known threats from performing malicious activity on your network. This is when you have already identified them and deployed security updates from your antivirus software vendor or your operating system vendor.
Signature Based Application Control
Signature-based approaches rely on examining the executable file format for specific patterns. It matches known characteristics of a malicious file, such as its size and CRC checksum value. This includes other unique characteristics of its code structure or data elements within it.
The goal is to determine if enough significant characteristics exist to classify it definitively as harmful. In practice, this is a challenging task since the characteristics of malicious files tend to be very similar to those of normal files. Consequently, there is a tradeoff between the level of security achieved and the level of false positives that occur.
A high level of false positives will result in the deployment of unnecessary countermeasures. Also, it includes the need to constantly keep security systems updated with new signatures.
Static Binary Analysis (SBA) has static binary analysis refers to analyzing code at compile time, before it is executed. This type of analysis is sometimes referred to as white-box testing. One such example is DBSCAN, an algorithm that uses a mathematical technique for detecting patterns in large sets of data.