Abstract: A system and a method is disclosed for scheduling mobile agents. The system includes a dispatcher and at least one data processor that embodies a scheduling engine. A transceiver is coupled to the dispatcher for performing two-way communication with mobile agents through mobile agent transceivers. The dispatcher is responsive to a reception of a message or signal that is transmitted from a mobile agent for entering the received signal into the scheduling engine. The scheduling engine is responsive to an occurrence of a triggering event and to signals received from mobile agents for recomputing a schedule of activities for a plurality of the mobile agents, and for causing information descriptive of the recomputed schedule to be selectively transmitted to none, one, or more than one of the mobile agents through the transceiver. The two-way communication can use radio devices capable of entering and displaying text messages.

Abstract: A method for restoring a computer program infected with a computer virus to its non-viral condition. The method uses certain information about an uninfected host program recorded prior to infection without relying upon pre-existing knowledge of the computer virus. The method includes: recording a checksum of the uninfected original program, the length of the program, and information pertaining to bytes located near the beginning and end of the original program; and, subsequent to any modification of the original program that is deemed suspicious, generating one or more trial reconstructions based on the recorded information and information contained in the modified file; comparing a checksum of each generated trial reconstruction with the checksum of the original program stored in the database; and outputting a trial reconstruction as the original uninfected program if its checksum matches that of the original program.

Abstract: Information pertaining to the verification of the identity of, and reversal of, a transformation of computer data is derived automatically based on a set of samples. The most important class of transformations is computer viruses. The process extracts this information for a large, fairly general class of viruses. Samples consisting of host programs infected with the virus and sample pairs consisting of an infected host and the corresponding original, uninfected host are obtained. A description of how the virus attaches to the host program, including locations within uninfected host of components of both the original host and the virus is generated. Viral code is matched across samples to obtain a description of "invariant" regions of the virus. Host bytes embedded within the virus are located. A description of the original host locations permits ant-virus software on a user's machine to restore the bulk of a program that has been infected.

Abstract: A searching method determines, given a specified encryption method (or set of encryption methods) and a specified pattern (or set of patterns), whether a given text contains an encryption, with any key, of anything fitting the pattern or patterns. The procedure detects and locates patterns that are present within data that has been encrypted, provided that the encryption method is one of a variety of simple methods that are often employed by computer programs such as computer viruses. The method includes:1. applying an invariance transformation to the chosen pattern (or set of patterns) to be matched, to obtain a "reduced pattern";2. applying the same reduction to the encrypted data to obtain "reduced data";3. using standard string searching techniques to detect the existence of a match between the reduced pattern and the reduced data, thereby signalling the likely existence of the pattern in encrypted form within the encrypted data;4.