short report of a published scientific paper 2

Can Cryptography Prevent Computer Viruses?
John F. Morar, David M. Chess
IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center
Hawthorne, NY, USA


Summary
Cryptography is one essential aspect to secure communications. There are lots of aspects to security, ranging from secure commerce and protecting passwords but cryptography can also prevent computer viruses. The paper will provide an overview of the ways that encryption technology imposes on virus protection and related security efforts, and provide some understanding of how encryption can help.
It is also included how viruses use encryption in order to spread faster with more protections for them to be more difficult to detect and analyze and the ways encryption can be very and useless in some cases for it can make virus protection more difficult. Cryptography can also be a barrier to effective virus prevention. There are a number of situation in which encryption of potentially infected data prevents the data from being examined for the presence of viruses. In particular, whenever encryption has been used to restrict the ability to read a dataset to some set of entities, and the entity attempting to check the dataset for viruses is not in that set, the encryption will prevent the virus check.
It is also briefly stated the use of cryptography in viruses, in antivirus software, and in general security systems. In some cases, he authors believe that cryptography will play an important role in the way our systems are secured in the future, both against viruses and against the more general class of emerging threats.

Evaluation
Cryptography is a particularly interesting field because of the amount of work that is done in secret. I now understand why there are a continuous flow of experts from other fields who offer cryptographic variations of ideas. There are in fact many extremely intelligent and well educated people with wide-ranging scientific interest who are active in this field. With the title alone, it can really awaken the interest of many people. It is clearly stated that even if cryptography is needed for secure communications, it is not by itself sufficient.
With regards to the format, it is not that awe-inspiring to look at. Perhaps it’s because it is not written the way it should be, in a professional and presentable format instead the text is just written in a simple manner. on the other hand, the main finding of the study is clearly stated and I found it impressive and informative, enough for me to understand what’s bugging on my mind.

References:
http://www.research.ibm.com/antivirus/SciPapers/VB2000JFM.htm
http://www.garykessler.net/library/crypto.html