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Irfan_A

UPX vs Antivirus

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Irfan_A
, 07-18-2010 at 01:03 PM (1654 Views)
Do you know UPX? Ultimate Packer for Excutables is excellent file compressor. See UPX: the Ultimate Packer for eXecutables - Homepage for details. But, this tool is often used by virus makers to create their virus as small as possible.

I am InstallSimple user and its setup module packed with UPX. So, many antivirus report this software as virus or trojan, but in actually this software is free from any viruses or trojans. Read on their forum for details : Install Simple forum - View topic - InstallSimple contains Trojan-Virus ?. I am sad after hear this news. I hope next version of InstallSimple is not use UPX again for its setup module.

So, will we use UPX to our program if it disharmonic with antivirus ? Or, should we inform to antivirus vendor that UPX is free from any viruses or trojans ?

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  1. TeenChristian's Avatar
    I think that if a program doesn't contain virus's then it shouldn't be making the antivirus programs go crazy, on the other hand I think the anti virus programs should be able to detect if UPX was used on the program its scanning. Just to warn the user of a possible virus.

    Does this EXE packer pack media into the EXE? Because I've been looking for something that would put all of my pictures into an EXE for games I make. That way no-one can steal the pictures. So far no luck, until now, maybe?

    Nice post
  2. Alexander's Avatar
    @Teen Christian, There are many EXE packers out there (this is what you're wishing to find that you mentioned), but they most likely will all lead to the exact same problem with false positives, as the definition of a trojan is to hide something within something that looks not suspicious. You may just need to simply link them as resources your own way in a DLL or something, but it takes nothing but a hex editor or a massively downloaded resource editor (resource hacker) to get the images out of that.

    @Irfan.A, I agree with you; are you sure there's no option to not use UPX in your installation software? You may want to hit up their forums and ask about it, because UPX is indeed hindering to a lot of developers because of its uses in the not so good-side of software.
  3. TeenChristian's Avatar
    Sounds confusing... I'll just concentrate on that when my game is finished
  4. Irfan_A's Avatar
    Thanks TeenChristian and Nullw0rm for your comments.
    If we use UPX for our installation software, maybe we will ask to our user to put our software to exceptions on antivirus scanning if we are sure that our software really not contains any malicious code.
  5. TeenChristian's Avatar
    Sounds like a good idea, but I'm not sure how affective that would be