VirusTotal API implementation in C programming language

Many users interact programmatically with VirusTotal via its public API, it is an easy HTTP+JSON interface that allows you to easily submit and check files in order to help improve security world-wide. Moreover, many VirusTotal Community volunteers have very kindly implemented the API in a wide variety of programming languages, some of these implementations are documented here, many others exist and we will progressively adding all those that we are made aware of.

This said, there was not any full implementation of the API in the C language, so that any C or C++ program that users might be building could easily interact with VirusTotal, at least we were not aware of any. We have released a VirusTotal interface written in C to our API  on github at https://github.com/VirusTotal/c-vtapi, any C or C++ program should be able to use it. Its goal is to implement all of the public API and private API features in C. The public API features will work for anyone with a free public API key, the private API features will only work for those who have licensed our services and use a private API key.

The recently announced VirusTotal Uploader for OS X internally uses the c-vtapi project. Using C it is a common building block that other programs or languages can interface to.

Suggestions, comments, patches and github pull request for improvements are welcome. Some ideas of improvements:

• Better windows support and testing. We have tested a lot with OS X and linux, the windows scaffolding is there, but is not well tested.
• More example programs or command line utilities that use this C API interface. For example, we know Sebastian Poeplau, being a busy guy, was looking for collaborators that would implement VirusTotal submissions in his awesome Ghost USB project, perhaps this C implementation makes it easier to perform the integration and some volunteers stand up.