Hexadecimal virus signatures database

Question

Over the past couple of weeks, I was in the process of developing a simple virus scanner. It works great but my question is does anybody know where I can get a database (a single file) that contains 8000 or more virus signatures WITH their names, and possibly risk meter (high, low, unknown)?

Answer 1

Try the ClamAV database. This also includes some more complex signatures, but some are just byte sequences.

The CVD file format is a compressed tar file with a header block attached; see here for header information, or this PDF for the real details.

As I understand it, you should be able to decompress it with

dd if=file.cvd bs=512 skip=1 | tar zxvf -

This will unpack to a collection of various files; for files that have simple hex signatures, these will be found in a file with the extension .db. Not all of these signatures are pure hex -- many of them contain wildcards such as ?? for "allow any byte here", * for "allow any number of intervening bytes here", (-4096) for "allow up to 4k of intervening bytes here", and so forth.