BlockAV is a decentralized antivirus solution which allows decentralization of the update and maintenance mechanisms of the software, traditionally performed by a central host, and uses a staggered scanning mechanism in order to improve performance. The peer-to-peer network maintenance mechanism lowered the average update propagation speed by 500% and is far less susceptible to targeted denial-of-service attacks. The feed-forward scanning mechanism significantly improved end-to-end performance of the malware matching system, to a degree of an average x14 increase, by decomposing the file matching process into efficient queries that operate in verifiably constant time.