Contradictions in Improving Speed of Virus Scanning
This tackles a practical issue for computer security users, but it appears incremental as it applies an existing problem-solving framework to a known bottleneck.
The paper addresses the persistent problem of slow virus scanning times despite advances in computing hardware, proposing to resolve contradictions between scanning speed and negative side effects like processor load, false positives, and security compromises. It applies TRIZ methodology to aim for increased scanning speed without trade-offs, though no concrete numerical results are provided.
Although everything in computing industry moves faster including the processor, memory speed, memory size, storage space etc. there is no improvement in virus scanning time. Although the processing speed has substantially increased, a typical full scanning is still taking several hours for an average computer. There is a serious need to improve the scanning time. Contradiction is a stage of problem solving where the nature of the actual problem is clearly explained in terms of at least two parameters, one improving and another worsening. While emphasizing one parameter strengthens the system position emphasizing another parameter weakens the system. In conventional methods a problem solver has to make a perfect balance between these conflicting parameters, where the situation is neither too much on one side nor too much on the other. The results of those methods, although increase the speed of virus scanning, results in disadvantages like load on processor, increase in false positives and compromise on security. The objective of TRIZ is not to accept a tradeoff between the speed of scanning and those other difficulties but to resolve the contradictions so that the speed of scanning increases without compromising with security and other harmful results.