From: nick at virus-l.demon.co.uk (Nick FitzGerald)
Subject: Avecho Glasswall Anti virus technolog?

"Zach Forsyth" <Zach.Forsyth@...ndra.com> wrote:

> Just wanted to see if anyone knew anything about the company called
> Avecho or their flagship product "Glasswall".

Nothing is known about the product, at least outside the company, as it 
is all hush hush because they have "revolutionary new technology" 
awaiting the granting of patents.

How revolutionary?

Well, it must be pretty damn revolutionary because it seems they have 
found a way to break the currently accepted laws of physics.  What 
Avecho claims its revolutionary new technology can achieve is outright 
impossible if certain heretofore unchallenged basic tenets of 
mathematics are actually true.  For example, the Halting Problem would 
have to fall for Avecho's claims to be true.  If you go to avecho.net 
and follow the "virus center", "GlassWall central", "how it works" menu 
items you come to page with suspiciously little descriptive text and a 
map-animated graphic.  Flying the mouse over the GlassWall part of the 
graphic displays this text:

   GlassWall(TM)

   avecho's GlassWall(TM) engine is the core of this revolutionary
   anti-virus technology. It will accept data from any source and any
   data that passes through the engine is certified 100% virus free.
   GlassWall(TM) will respond instantly to any virus threat known or
   unknown. It requires no definition files or administrator
   intervention during its operation which makes GlassWall(TM) the
   only 100% effective anti-virus technology capable of automatic,
   instant response and zero propagation of any virus, known or yet
   to be developed.  

Note -- "GlassWall ... will accept data from any source and any data 
that passes through the engine is certified 100% virus free".  That is 
clearly a claim that Avecho's staff have either solved, or otherwise 
rebuked, the Halting program...

Oh, but wait a minute -- unlike all the "revolutionary" approaches that 
have come before, also claiming to make existing antivirus technology 
obsolete, there is no talk of false positive rates.  Usually these 
revolutionary approaches claim perfect detection (as does Avecho) and 
perfect differentiation (i.e. "no false positives").  Perhaps Avecho 
has not solved the Halting Problem at all and has simply decided that a 
any number of healthy babies being thrown out with the bath water is an 
acceptable price?

And note the sophistry in Avecho's claims for GlassWall.  Still on the 
animated graphic, fly your mouse over "trust bypass":

   trust bypass  

   Administrators can manage the coverage of the GlassWall(TM) engine
   by defining data types that may avoid the anti-virus engine but
   still pass through the system for users to access. Bypassing
   GlassWall(TM) is done at your own risk. Account administrators must
   understand that absolute protection cannot be assured if you choose
   this option, although industry best practice screening is still
   applied.  

So, viruses can still be passed through a _system_ using Avecho's 
"revolutionary" technology (many of which would be detected by what 
Avecho suggests is "inferior" conventional virus scanners through their 
emulation, heuristic and generic detection technologies) but to do this 
they pass "around", rather than "through" Avecho's GlassWall technology 
allowing Avecho to maintain the claim that GlassWall is clearly better.

And note that I am entirely ignoring the issue of whether Avecho's 
virusCensor and/or GlassWall can perfectly detect any and every example 
of malformed message and attachment encoding, embedding and so on that 
some or other hokey, real-world MUA will "correctly" decode.  At a 
conference recently, when I pointed out to an Avecho company 
representative that such malformations were the bane of content 
filtering packages pretty much regardless of what they were trying to 
filter out, he simply brushed the claim off saying that if that was my 
concern I clearly had no idea how the product worked.  How that sales-
oid's brush-off and the nice "how it works" diagram discussed above fit 
together I'll leave as an exercise for those readers of this list who 
have the necessary technical expertise in such matters  (a level that 
must, apparently, be greater than my own) to decide.

> Any information from someone on the list that has had contact with them
> would be great.

Bearing in mind they are _aching_ to sell this off (and apparently in a 
huge rush to do so, perhaps even before the ink on the patents is dry) 
here is a paraphrase of what I told the just-mentioned sales-oid...

"Avecho and its "revolutionary" technology most likely won't exist in a 
few (2-3) years.  Most likely Avecho's principals will have sold the 
major IP (the patents) to some technology company that has no idea what 
AV and the like is about and will then dissolve the company pocketing a 
tidy sum each.  The technically able folk at the company that made 
Avecho's principals multi-millionaires will look at the gift horse 
they've just been presented by the prat who was suckered into parting 
with a chunk of that company's cash reserves, laugh and return to doing 
whatever it was they do that ensures their employer keeps paying their 
wages."

(Another moderately likely scenario I did not suggest to him is that 
actually the world will see through Avecho's glorified 90-something% 
effective blocking technology, they will fail to sell it (perhaps the 
patent applications fail?) and they will go on to make a modestly 
comfortable, but not outrageously luxurious, living running a virus-
filtering Email, web, etc ASP much like MessageLabs...)

I'll finally point out -- in case the sales-oid mentioned above still 
hasn't figured it out and gets to see this -- that I am not defending 
the rest of AV against the bogus Avecho GlassWall claims.  I am, as 
usual, pointing out the badly misleading, technologically inept and 
other stupidities surrounding the clearly overly marketing-driven 
claims being made for the products and services of his company.  In 
this, his company is no better than _or different from_ most other AV 
producers at some time or other in their development.  As the brattish 
"new kids on the block" he and his cronies are simply repeating the 
idiotic overhyping we've all seen far too many times already.  If 
Avecho had really wanted to be taken seriously (assuming there actually 
might be something serious or interesting in what it is doing) it 
certainly chose precisely the best way to appear that it was much more 
interested in achieving exactly the opposite impression...


-- 
Nick FitzGerald
Computer Virus Consulting Ltd.
Ph/FAX: +64 3 3529854

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