Scanning attachment before uploading on the server?

Question

I am giving to upload functionality, i want that files must be scaned on Server side, Before they uploaded and then they are are saved on that server.

Is there any free available antivirus engines to scan the attachment on the server?

Thanks

Answer 1

Before uploading is hard; you could rather check it after upload but before making it available for download. To do so you can use online antivirus services - but it's a very timeconsuming solution, and you should certainly use a separate thread or service - or scan it yourself, using one of the many available antivirus engines (a few of them are free, but the others usually cost very few, less than $10 per year).

EDIT: the most famous (for me, at least) open source antivirus tool is ClamWin, which is released under GPL. For free (as in free beer) engines, I can only suggest to search "free antivirus engine" or the like, not because I'm lazy but because I've never used one and don't feel comfortable suggesting things I don't know.

Answer 2

Sure, depending on what virus-checking software you're going to use for the scan -- for example, the commercial product metascan offers an API to integrate your programs with many different commercial anti-virus products.

Answer 3

You can't exactly "scan" the file on the client. However, some manipulation is possible, determined by the client security settings. I believe it is quite difficult as browsers implement such functionality differently (Internet Explorer could use ActiveX scripting for example). You could try to look into that perhaps.

Regarding free antivirus, I believe Google has the answer ;) But seriously, Avast and AVG are both providing home users with free versions of their antivirus. Since you haven't said anything about your purpose of the server, I don't know whether using the free versions is legal.

If you're willing to pay a bit for a AV solution, I can recomend NOD32. That said, I should mention that I have no experience with the server version. I use the workstation version, which is very light weight.