Categorizing Software Applications

This paper provides an extensive overview of existing research in the field of categorizing software applications. This research is compared and discussed based on a number of different criteria: the categorization attributes that are supported, the specific techniques and algorithms that are used for supporting these attribute based categorization; the types of software artifacts that are being categorized; the important issues that need to be taken into account when building categorization engine and the use of software categorization engine. A running example is used throughout the paper to explain and illustrate the main concepts. The Microsoft's Windows AppLocker is feature for providing more flexibility for allow or blocking of application according to rules. But still there is scope to improve this system. Microsoft’s AppLocker is supported only for specific OS Version like enterprise and professional versions. Also AppLocker works on Hash Based rules or Publisher signing certificate rules. So the applications not having valid sign certificate and get changed or updated is not feasible to block with the help of AppLocker. For such conditions of update of software IT administrators need to monitor continuously. So to overcome the problems in the AppLocker we are going to implement the Category based application engine. Keywords— Hash, Publisher, Signing, AppLocker, Version