Application reputation service

摘要

The claimed subject matter is directed to the use of an application reputation service to assist users with minimizing their computerized machines' exposure to infection from malware. The claimed subject matter provides an application reputation service that contains the reputations for elements that are known to be non-malicious as well as those known to be malicious. One embodiment is implemented as a method to determine the reputation of an element (e.g., an application). When a user attempts to install or execute a new application, the Application Reputation Service is queried by the user's machine with a set of identities for the element. The reputation of the application is determined by referencing a knowledge base of known reputations and returns an indication (e.g., an overall rating, or a flag) of how safe that application would be to install and run on the user's computer.

主权项

1. A method performed on at least one computing device, the method comprising:
obtaining identity information that includes a set of identities, where the identities in the set corresponds to an application with a degree of specificity; ranking the identities in the set of identities by relevance, where the relevance of each identity in the set is based on the degree of specificity of the each identity to the application; determining a reputation for each identity in the ranked set of identities that is known to a reputation service provider; and determining a reputation of the application based on at least some of the determined reputations of the known identities, and further based on at least some of the relevances of the identities.