...infection.
Certain commercial products are identified in this paper in order to adequately specify procedures being described. In no case does such identification imply recommendation or endorsement by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, nor does it imply that the material identified is necessarily the best for the purpose.

...executable.
An executable is an abstraction for programs, command files and other objects on a computer system that can be executed. On a DOS PC, for example, this would include batch command files, COM files, EXE-format files and boot sectors of disks.

...viruses.
A few tools are designed to prevent infection by one or more viruses. The discussion of these tools is limited to Section 4.7.2, Inoculation, due to their limited application.

...baseline
The original file names and their corresponding checksums.

...hashing.
Discussion of cryptographic terminology is beyond the scope of this document. Please see []

...utilities.
Two examples of these system utilities are Norton Utilities for the PC and ResEdit for the Macintosh.

...required.
Exceptions, such as the DIR-2 PC virus, may be extremely difficult to remove without appropriate tools. In this case, the only alternative to removal tools is to format the disk.

...identification.
Some scanners can also detect known Trojan horses.

...information.
Algorithms for detection tend to be independently developed.

konczal@csrc.ncsl.nist.gov
Fri Mar 11 21:26:02 EST 1994