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What they’re describing is a polymorphic virus. A great analogy for SV startups. It works great in assembly, not so much for higher level languages.
by throwup238 6mo ago
What they’re describing is a polymorphic virus. A great analogy for SV startups.
It works great in assembly, not so much for higher level languages.
- brookst 6mo agoIs all polymorphic code virii?
- throwup238 6mo agoNot necessarily, but in practice no one has any use for the technique except to obfuscate viruses, with the exception of academic research. The nonvirus equivalent is JITs which are present in all major browsers and tons of other runtimes, but they have no use for polymorphism except at a theoretical level (they all use it extensively, but at the type level).
- brookst 6mo agoI fought with polymorphic code quite a bit back when I was removing copy protection (many decades ago). There may be other cases where making debugging hard is desirable.
- throwup238 6mo agoGreat point! I forgot about copy protection. Although in my defense, in my line of work that’s indistinguishable from a rootkit :)