Rainer Fahs , Chairman of the European Institute for Anti Virus - DAVFI

Rainer Fahs , Chairman of the European Institute for Anti Virus
Research (EICAR),
a European group of international experts in the field of
information security.
Paris, La Cantine, Silicon Sentier – le 10/09/2012
Lancement du comité utilisateurs, (DAVFI) Démonstrateurs d’Antivirus Français et
Internationaux
DISCOURS
My name is Rainer Fahs and I am the Chairman of the European Institute for Anti
Virus Research (EICAR), a European group of international experts in the field of
information security.
While EICAR originally was founded in order to develop a common approach
against an at that time new threat, the computer virus, in the meantime EICAR is
addressing the whole bandwidth or information security inclusive the legal and
psychological aspects of the user.
EICAR is probably the only true independent organisation that is supporting
scientific research in that area and has access to a large number of high level
experts from all areas.
Unfortunately, the Anti-Virus community is not a homogeneous body but rather a
number of diverse groupings with only one common denominator and that is
commercial benefits. The current AV products are definitely not the best technical
products, but rather the best saleable products. We have to admit, that having an
AV product running on your computer is better than going unprotected on the
net, but for those who understand a bit better what these products are doing and
how they work it is questionable whether or not these products still respond to
the contemporary environment to the need of the user.
And this is another dimension of the current products – once developed by smart
front line engineers; they have just been adapted again and again to the
changing environments following the new threats and vulnerabilities of IT
systems – but do they really respond to the user’s requirements?
For the last couple of years EICAR has closely worked together with ESIEA and
Eric Filiol and his students and a large number of excellent scientific papers have
been presented at our annual conferences.
It is now for about one and a half year that the work in ESIEA was concentrating
on challenging current AV products from the technology and its latest

developments, inclusive the algorithmic level and its mathematical foundations.
It is exactly that area, where Eric Filiol and his students have identified room for
improvement.
When the research also discovered that some of the products where manipulated
on purpose to support governmental requirements, it became more and more
obvious that the time has come for a new approach, maybe a new paradigm for
the defence of malicious code.
Sustaining innovations are not sufficient any more, it is time for disruptive
innovations and I am very pleased to announce that EICAR will support the DAVFI
project by providing the international platform on which the new approach shall
be based.
As a first step, we will actively support the development of user’s requirements
and I am really looking forward to the first fruits of this new approach.
Ladies and Gentlemen
Thank you very much