DeepScreen makes our EXE crash without any popup

[REDACTED]

hi everyone!!

We are developing a super cool online music mixing website (http://you.dj) and we are currently porting our website to a desktop app thanks to NWJS.

To record user's audio streams, we made a small command line EXE with VisualStudio 2013 and this little EXE (20Ko) gives us lot of headache

Indeed it looks like Avast DeepScreen makes it crash. When we run the EXE, it crashes directly, including the container (CMD or NodeJS). Then it is impossible to kill the EXE process and the container process, only a reboot of the machine solve it.

Also, Avast doesn't display anything! No popups, no log, no warning, nothing... even if we disabled the gaming/silent mode.

I tried to identify if one part of the code was the problem, but even with a simple hello world application the problem happens.

The only solution is to add the EXE in the DeepScreen exclusion list BUT this can not be a solution since the app will be used by thousands of people.

I have found some posts in this forum describing this exact problem. The solution proposed was to sign the code. So here is my question :

- First, if we submit our small EXE to your false-positive procedure, can we fix this problem? (I can also send the source code)

- Does code signing will really avoid the EXE to be run under DeepScreen? (code signing are pretty heavy/costly, we would love to avoid this for a such small EXE)

Thanks for your answers, we are so stuck for days

Josh

[REDACTED]

Ok here I got something intersting. I just installed the last Avast 2016 (version 12.3.xxx) as someone mentioned on the forum and now a DeepScreen popup showed up as expected and closed after 15 seconds saying that everything is ok. Nothing crashed!

My previous Avast version was 10.3.xxx and I assume DeepScreen was buggy on it. I'm not sure to understand, Avast shouldn't auto-update on its own?

So our program at least doesn't need the machine to get reboot, which is a great improvement . Now, it would be amazing to remove the DeepScreen popup at all, so what should we do for this?
submit our EXE to false-positive? or maybe DeepScreen will stop scanning our EXE when a significant number of people use our app? or is code signing the only solution?

Again thanks a lot guys!!
keep up the good work

[Asyn]

As you're a developer, read here:

-> https://www.avast.com/faq.php?article=AVKB229
-> https://www.avast.com/faq.php?article=AVKB228

[RejZoR]

I think rather than just solving it with a digital signature (which would help) to rather figure out why it's crashing it without the popup. Because that's certainly not a normal behavior. Even if app only operates for a millisecond, it should invoke the popup from avast!. And in this case, something is apparently preventing that from happening.

[Eddy]

Also, Avast doesn't display anything! No popups, no log, no warning, nothing

Just in case you have to troubleshoot again, make sure you have verbose logging enabled.
It will show you a lot more and might help finding the problem.