Safebrowsing

CURRENT STATUS at October 2020.

The safebrowsing feature has now been spun off into a related project. It requires substantially more effort to implement safebrowsing than simply enabling the relevant freshclam.conf configuration option.

Briefly, tools are needed to

[*] For efficiency, the API permits downloading differences, in much the same way that ClamAV itself uses .cdiff files.

Documentation can be found at

https://github.com/Cisco-Talos/clamav-safebrowsing

HISTORY

ClamAV 0.95 introduced support for the Google Safe Browsing database.

For use with ClamAV a copy of the database was packed inside the file “safebrowsing.cvd” which was distributed in the same way as the other ClamAV database files via the ClamAV mirror network. Downloading the database was disabled by default, and the feature was to be enabled only with extreme caution. In order to enable this feature it was necessary to add the option SafeBrowsing Yes to freshclam.conf. This would tell freshclam to download the safebrowsing.cvd database, and when ClamAV found the database in the database directory it would enable the safe browsing feature. To turn it off it was necessary to remove the configuration option from freshclam.conf AND to remove the safebrowsing files from the database directory. If clamd was running it was necessary to restart it.

Updates to the safebrowsing.cvd database were discontinued in 2019 and it was declared obsolete.