Web Reputation Service for Real-Time Threat Filtering
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current solutions fail to provide enhanced security for computer users against various online threats such as viruses, malware, spyware, adware, and phishing, as they lack real-time reputation assessment and filtering mechanisms for web content.
Innovation Solution
A web reputation service that utilizes a real-time database query interface to assess the reputation of web content through link structure analysis, white lists, heuristic tests, and user feedback, providing filtering and alerting mechanisms to prevent interactions with malicious sites and content.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If real-time reputation assessment and filtering mechanisms are implemented, then user security is improved, but system complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a reputation service as an intermediary component that mediates between the user's web browser and the internet. This service acts as a proxy, intercepting web requests, assessing their reputation in real-time, and filtering them before they reach the user's device. By placing this intermediary layer, the system achieves enhanced security without fundamentally redesigning the entire web browsing architecture, thus managing complexity while improving reliability.
Solution Approach 2:
The system performs preliminary reputation assessment of web content before the user interacts with it. By pre-evaluating websites, scripts, and downloadable content for malicious characteristics, the system can block threats before they execute on the user's device. This preliminary action prevents security incidents rather than responding to them, improving user security while keeping the real-time processing requirements manageable.
2Measurement precision
If real-time database queries are performed for each web content request, then reputation accuracy is improved, but processing speed decreases
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary reputation assessments and stores results in a database before users need them. Websites, scripts, and content are evaluated in advance, and their reputation scores are cached. When users make web requests, the system queries this pre-computed database rather than performing full real-time analysis, thus maintaining accurate reputation information while significantly improving processing speed.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent combines multiple reputation assessment methods (link structure analysis, white lists, black lists, heuristic tests, and user feedback) into a unified database system. By merging these different data sources and assessment techniques into a single integrated reputation database, the system achieves comprehensive and accurate reputation evaluation while streamlining the query process, thereby maintaining precision without sacrificing speed.
3Measurement precision
If multiple reputation assessment methods are combined, then assessment accuracy is improved, but computational resources increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system implements a tiered reputation assessment approach where not all assessment methods are applied to every web content request. Instead, it uses a combination of white lists, black lists, and cached reputation data for common websites, reserving more computationally intensive methods like link structure analysis and heuristic tests for less common or suspicious content. This partial application of assessment methods maintains accuracy for high-risk content while conserving computational resources for routine requests.
Data Source
AI summary
An aspect of the present invention relates to methods and systems involving receiving a request for web content from a client computing facility, presenting the web content, and retrieving an indicia of a reputation assessment of the web content and delivering the indicia to the client computing facility in coordination with delivery of the web content to the client computing facility.