Contradictions in Improving Speed of Virus Scanning

TL;DR

This paper discusses the persistent challenge of improving virus scanning speed despite advances in computing hardware, highlighting contradictions and proposing TRIZ-based solutions to enhance speed without security tradeoffs.

Contribution

It introduces a contradiction-based approach using TRIZ to increase virus scanning speed without compromising security or increasing false positives.

Findings

Scanning time remains several hours despite hardware improvements

TRIZ methodology can resolve contradictions in virus scanning

Proposed solutions aim to enhance speed without security tradeoffs

Abstract

Although everything in computing industry moves faster including the processor, memory speed, memory size, storage space etc. there is no improvement in virus scanning time. Although the processing speed has substantially increased, a typical full scanning is still taking several hours for an average computer. There is a serious need to improve the scanning time. Contradiction is a stage of problem solving where the nature of the actual problem is clearly explained in terms of at least two parameters, one improving and another worsening. While emphasizing one parameter strengthens the system position emphasizing another parameter weakens the system. In conventional methods a problem solver has to make a perfect balance between these conflicting parameters, where the situation is neither too much on one side nor too much on the other. The results of those methods, although increase the speed of virus scanning, results in disadvantages like load on processor, increase in false positives and compromise on security. The objective of TRIZ is not to accept a tradeoff between the speed of scanning and those other difficulties but to resolve the contradictions so that the speed of scanning increases without compromising with security and other harmful results.