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Managed Bindings for ClamAV

Introduction

ClamAV.Managed is a library written in C# for the .NET Framework and Mono, providing managed bindings for libclamav. It includes ClamAV.Managed.PowerShell, a set of PowerShell cmdlets for ClamAV scanning. It also comes with GUI sample code for performing virus scanning.

Prerequisites

To use ClamAV.Managed, P/Invoke must be able to locate libclamav, either in your binary's execution directory or at some location in your system's library search path.

You can obtain ClamAV binaries compiled for Windows at http://oss.netfarm.it/clamav/. It is recommended to use a version of libclamav compiled with Microsoft Visual C++.

ClamAV.Managed is designed to be platform-agnostic with the intention of supporting Mono on Linux and Mac OS X. Although this is currently not a widely used combination, users are encouraged to try the software on these platforms to help find any possible issues that may arise.

For file scanning to work, you need to download ClamAV databases from http://www.clamav.net. Databases can be loaded from an arbitrary directory by specifying a path in the ClamEngine.LoadDatabase method, or from a folder in your application's working directory. This folder may be named db or database, depending on which build of libclamav you are running.

Getting Started

ClamAV.Managed Library

To get started using ClamAV.Managed in your project, you need to add a reference to ClamAV.Managed.dll.

libclamav must be either in your application's binary directory, or some other system path where it may be discovered. It is recommended that you bundle libclamav with your application, taking care to comply with the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2.

You need to obtain ClamAV databases. By default, ClamAV looks for databases in a folder called db in the current working directory. Depending on the version of ClamAV, this directory may be called database instead. You can specify an arbitrary location from which to load virus databases as an argument to the ClamEngine.LoadDatabase method.

It is recommended to use the freshclam utility to obtain the latest ClamAV databases, but you can also try the FetchDatabases.ps1 PowerShell script in the scripts directory and adapt it to your own purposes, remembering to select which databases you would like to obtain and changing the download URL to a local mirror.

You can find a list of ClamAV database mirrors at http://www.clamav.net/mirrors.html. Databases will be named main.cvd, daily.cvd, bytecode.cvd, safebrowsing.cvd in the root directory of the mirror. More information about obtaining ClamAV databases can be found on the ClamAV website.

ClamAV.Managed.Async Task-based Asynchronous Scanning

ClamAV.Managed provides a task-based asynchronous API using the new async/await feature for .NET 4.5.1 in the ClamAV.Managed.Async project.

These extensions are still experimental, and you may encounter issues while performing parallel scans, particularly with a large quantity of long-running scan tasks.

ClamAV.Managed.Async is implemented as extension methods and can be used by adding a reference to the library from your project.

ClamAV.Managed.PowerShell Cmdlets

To use the cmdlets provided by ClamAV.Managed.PowerShell, use the New-ClamEngine cmdlet.

  1. Use Import-Module to load the ClamAV.Managed.PowerShell library. Assume we have created a directory C:\ClamAV-Managed, containing ClamAV.Managed.dll, ClamAV.Managed.PowerShell.dll, ClamAV.Managed.PowerShell.psd1, libclamav.dll and a subdirectory containing definitions datases called db. We're now ready to proceed. Import-Module C:\ClamAV-Managed\ClamAV.Managed.PowerShell.psd1
  2. Create an instance of the ClamAV engine. $eng = New-ClamEngine -WithDatabase C:\ClamAV-Managed\db
  3. If you didn't provide a -WithDatabase parameter to New-ClamEngine, use Import-ClamDatabase to load a definitions database. Import-ClamDatabase -Engine $eng -Path C:\ClamAV-Managed\db
  4. To scan a file: Invoke-ClamScanFile -Engine $eng -Path C:\File.exe
  5. To scan a directory: Invoke-ClamScanDirectory -Engine $eng -Path C:\Directory\

Import-ClamDatabase will, by default, look for databases in libclamav's default subdirectory, probably db or perhaps database, within the directory containing the ClamAV.Managed.PowerShell dynamic library. However, you may specify a path manually with the -DatabasePath parameter.

Samples

Refer to the project ClamAV.Managed.Samples.Gui to see an example of ClamAV.Managed in action. To run the sample, you need to obtain libclamav, as described above, and download virus databases to a folder named db in the binary directory.

ClamAV.Managed.Samples.AsyncGui provides a sample with a user interface implemented using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).

License Information

This project is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2. You can find a full copy of the license text in GPLv2.txt.

Disclaimer

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

While the public version of this library is still in early development, the type names and class interfaces are subject to change.