SplitScreen: Enabling Efficient, Distributed Malware Detection

The authors present the design and implementation of a novel anti-malware system called SplitScreen. SplitScreen performs an additional screening step prior to the signature matching phase found in existing approaches. The screening step filters out most non-infected files (90%) and also identifies malware signatures that are not of interest (99%). The screening step significantly improves end-to-end performance because safe files are quickly identified and are not processed further, and malware files can subsequently be scanned using only the signatures that are necessary.