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It's a concept that relies on a great deal of magic to function properly. The binary-only compiler we have must insert code to propagate the infection. To do so
by agent327 5y ago
It's a concept that relies on a great deal of magic to function properly. The binary-only compiler we have must insert code to propagate the infection. To do so it must know it is compiling a compiler, and understand precisely how to affect code generation, without breaking anything. That... feels like an undecidable problem to me.
- asddubs 5y agosure it's undecidable, you can reduce a decider for the word problem to that pretty easily, but in practice you probably only have to recognize a few common compilers to do a good enough job
- agent327 5y agoBut the viral property that makes this attack so insidious is, in the end, not sufficiently viral: the compiler will eventually drift away (as a consequence of it being developed further, of course) from the patterns it recognizes. The attack is not as dangerous as it sounds.
- asddubs 5y agoI'm not really arguing that too much, since it's a pretty elaborate and finnicky thing ultimately, although I would wager to say that you could probably find patterns to recognize and modify clang/gcc/other relatively stable compilers for a long time to come (assuming no active mitigations against it)