Open Access
ARTICLE
An Immunization Scheme for Ransomware
Jingping Song1, Qingyu Meng1, Chenke Luo2, Nitin Naik3, Jian Xu1, *
1 Software College, Northeastern University, Shenyang, 110169, China.
2 School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430072, China.
3 School of Computing, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, PO1 2DT, UK.
* Corresponding Author: Jian Xu. Email: .
Computers, Materials & Continua 2020, 64(2), 1051-1061. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2020.010592
Received 12 March 2020; Accepted 14 April 2020; Issue published 10 June 2020
Abstract
In recent years, as the popularity of anonymous currencies such as Bitcoin has
made the tracking of ransomware attackers more difficult, the amount of ransomware
attacks against personal computers and enterprise production servers is increasing
rapidly. The ransomware has a wide range of influence and spreads all over the world. It
is affecting many industries including internet, education, medical care, traditional
industry, etc. This paper uses the idea of virus immunity to design an immunization
solution for ransomware viruses to solve the problems of traditional ransomware defense
methods (such as anti-virus software, firewalls, etc.), which cannot meet the requirements
of rapid detection and immediate prevention of new outbreaks attacks. Our scheme
includes two parts: server and client. The server provides an immune configuration file
and configuration file management functions, including a configuration file module, a
cryptography algorithm module, and a display module. The client obtains the
immunization configuration file from server in real time, and performs the corresponding
operations according to the configuration file to make the computer have an immune
function for a specific ransomware, including an update module, a configuration file
module, a cryptography algorithm module, a control module, and a log module. This
scheme controls mutexes, services, files and registries respectively, to destroy the
triggering conditions of the virus and finally achieve the purpose of immunizing a
computer from a specific ransomware.
Keywords
Cite This Article
J. Song, Q. Meng, C. Luo, N. Naik and J. Xu, "An immunization scheme for ransomware,"
Computers, Materials & Continua, vol. 64, no.2, pp. 1051–1061, 2020. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2020.010592