Differences Between MetaDefender Core v4 and v5

We are very excited to inform you about the release of version 5.0.0 of our MetaDefender Core!

The new version is designed to enhance the product performance, user experience, as well as to provide more flexibility, security, and scalability for our customers.

At the same time, we are also committed to keeping backward compatibility for whom running MetaDefender Core v4, and avoid the need for updating your client integration to move forward with MetaDefender Core v5.

Below are some highlights of the first v5 release, MetaDefender Core 5.0.0:

New product architecture

This version introduces a simpler product architecture that speeds up integration and automation, file processing flow, and immensely enhance the product performance and efficiency.

Earlier versions utilized MetaDefender Node concept, designed to support scaling of the scanning infrastructure by distributing scan requests among several different processing Nodes. Product licensing was based on number of Node instances. The benefit of having such a distributed infrastructure is that based on Node loads, Metadefender Core server can always choose the most appropriate Node to assign a new scan task to. However, having nodes in the v4 architecture caused more complexity and possible latency in the processing flow and entailed maintenance cost.

In this release, we retired multi-Node deployment and restructured MetaDefender Core's backend. This alteration significantly improves file processing speed and product efficiency, as well as eliminates extra cost for maintaining node services. Users now can simply install additional MetaDefender Core instances for scalability requirement, as well as configure their own load balancer to coordinate tasks among multiple MetaDefender Core instances. Accordingly, product licensing is now based on number of the product instances.

Please be informed that

• All existing administrative APIs related to "Node" on v4 will be kept as it is on v5 to ensure backward compatibility with existing client integrations.
• Applicable settings defined in Windows registry (Windows) or ometascan-node.conf config file (Linux) for Node will be migrated to Core. Details: MetaDefender Configuration

Brand-new product user interface

The second notable update in this version is a brand-new UI for the management console, which was designed with the focus on the quality and thoughtfulness of the user experience. The new administrative console UI provides an advanced set of Core features and observable processing status.

Comprehensive executive dashboard reporting offers dynamic, real-time and actionable threat insights. It also provides visibility of your security posture allowing you to paint a picture of security that aligns with the overall business. The report includes easy-to-read charts, graphs, and statistic explanation that help your security professionals reduce clutter, gather information quicker, spot threat activity early and act swiftly.

We’re continuing to improve our product UI to provide users an excellent experience with the application and overall usability. Please expect more powerful UI features coming in next releases.

New compression archive engine for archive sanitization

In previous version, MetaDefender Core’s archive engine implemented four functions including decryption, extraction, encryption and compression that with a high volume of files it takes time to process them all. For the purpose of enhancing archive handling performance, this release comes with a separated compression archive engine, which dedicatedly processes archive sanitization (compression and encryption). It is also created to facilitate maintenance and further feature development.

Import & export configurations

Not only workflow settings like in previous versions, but also all other general settings (update, security, data retention, server, hashes to skip) and most importantly, user settings, will be able to export and import on MetaDefender Core version 5.

Learn more at Import/Export configuration

Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2 based installation

Required to install Universal C Runtime in Windows separately before installing MetaDefender Core 5.0.0 or newer.

Windows application event logging disabled by default

Applicable only to Windows OS based MetaDefender Core.

Help avoid duplicated logging with separate file option, and improve overall processing performance. Of course, when being still valid to you, you are still supported to enable it back.

CSRF token header renamed

CSRF token originally created for security strengthening and being used by MetaDefender Core management console UI since version 4.21.0 via header oms_csrf_token

To get it compliant with some load balancers which do not accept underscore in header name by default, and save you from additional load balancer configuration step, we have now changed the header name to oms-csrf-token

This change does not impact to any REST API based client integration.

More comprehensive and accurate error messages on REST APIs

Impacting on following REST API endpoints:

• PUT /admin/config/session
• PUT /admin/config/update
• PUT /admin/config/scan
• PUT /admin/config/skip
• PUT /admin/config/auditlog
• PUT /admin/config/webhook
• PUT /admin/config/rule

Upload time and queue time logic updated in JSON scan response

Impacting on following REST API endpoints:

• GET /file/{data_id}
• GET /hash/{md5/sha1/sha256}
• GET /archive/{data_id}
• POST /file/{async}

Added new field:

• receive_data_timestamp: The timestamp when upload progress started (first byte received) (in milliseconds)
• upload_time: Total time elapsed for upload process (in milliseconds)

Modified existing field (new logic):

• upload_timestamp: The timestamp when upload progress finished (all bytes received) (in milliseconds)
• queue_time: Total time elapsed for file processing task was waiting in MetaDefender Core’s queue until being picked up (queue time = start_time - upload_ timestamp) (in milliseconds)

Release version 5.0.0 also comes with variety of outstanding features and improvements.

For detailed information about our latest release please view our Release notes