Malicious Process Conscious Operating Systems (MPCOS)

This paper presents methods towards making an operating system malicious activity conscious. In addition to the existing focus of operating systems mainly on resource and user management, we propose that an operating system should also try to prevent the execution of malicious code such as viruses and worms. Exploiting the fact that malicious code/programs require services from the operating system provided via system calls, we hypothesized and demonstrated that the operating system is the ideal location where malicious code prevention has to be attempted. Since computer security has a human element as well, in our approach we followed control of malicious activity by forcing them to run with the consent of the user. Our proposal is implemented and tested in a Linux environment and showed good results.