The taggant is dead.. long live the umm..

[evlncrn8]

 

Quote

 

This letter is to notify  you that the Taggant System, a component of the IEEE Anti-Malware Support Service(AMSS), will shut down on 31 July 2018.  Taggants have not been adopted  as much as we had expected. Too few  are using the Taggant System to justify the cost of maintaining the Taggant System.

All Taggant-related email aliases and listservs will also be deleted on 31 July 2018.  

 

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just got that, amazing.. so many years and back and forth emails which i saw, some were comical, some were facepalm ones, some involved people on this very board.. basically it went through 2 revisions, nobody could decide on anything, and the av people were really lazy in picking it up, some taking MONTHS to update their code from the github repository, and really it all just boiled down to digital signatures and checksums... but now its dead.. i really hope someone charts the history, and all the email communications and ideas, because perhaps some good can come out of it and the industry can learn how not to do things

Edited April 30, 2018 by evlncrn8

[kao]

Taggant was a great idea, killed by stupid academics, standards a bureaucracy.

I have a huge respect for Igor Muttik as a researcher - but with taggant he just reinvented the wheel (ie. digital signature). Initial version was supposed to be extremely fast and easy to verify. A replacement for proprietary watermarks that each PE protector used to identify stolen licences, if you wish. If it was just that, AV industry would happily use it. But IEEE just kept adding sh!t to it until it became same-thing-as-digital-signature-just-named-differently.

In the present form, it doesn't deserve to exist. RIP.

[Bartosz Wójcik]

It wasn't implemented in most antivirus products and even it was - it didn't work because they wanted to wait until the packer/protector got "reputable"