v0.4.0 - Risk heuristics
hightower stops just listing processes and starts judging them. scan --all
now assigns each process a risk verdict and sorts the flagged ones to the top.
What's new
- Risk verdicts on every process:
trusted/review/suspicious, in a
newRISK / PID / NAME / CATEGORY / PATHtable, worst-first, with a summary
line (N suspicious, M to review). - Three heuristics (Strategy pattern, in
core):- Path masquerading -- a known Windows name running from the wrong folder ->
suspicious. - Unsigned / untrusted binary -- via Authenticode
WinVerifyTrust. - Unknown process -- not in the database and not validly signed ->
review.
- Path masquerading -- a known Windows name running from the wrong folder ->
- Authenticode signature checks (
adapters), run in parallel across
processes withstd::thread::scope.
Limitations (by design)
- Educational aid, not an antivirus -- verdicts are prompts to investigate,
not proof. Expect false positives and false negatives. - Signature checks read embedded signatures only; catalog-signed system
binaries are handled via the known-process database instead. - Publisher-name extraction and richer filtering are still to come.
Download
hightower-v0.4.0-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.exe (Windows x64, unsigned -- SmartScreen
may warn). Or build from source: cargo build -p hightower-cli --release.
Next
v0.5.0 -- hightower explain <name|pid> and scan --json.