Throttling Computer Viruses

An anonymous reader writes "An article in the Economist that looks at a new way to thwart computer viral epidemics, by focusing on making computers more resilient rather than resistant. The idea is to slow the spread of viral epidemics allowing effective human intervention rather than attempting to make a computer completely resistant to attack."

Comments

Link to paper

[NearlyHeadless]

Here's Williamson's paper on the idea: Throttling Viruses: Restricting propagation to defeat malicious mobile code I haven't read it yet, but I see one potential problem right away. When you load a web page, you normally make quite a few connections--one for each image, e.g. I'll have to see how he handles that

Re:I have a brilliantly original idea

[FortKnox]

True, but why do people have to keep writing programs with static buffer sizes?

I think it isn't that people WRITE programs with static buffers now-a-days as much as it is that people who maintain old software don't fix the static buffers.

Plus I could also argue what is more important to the program? Static gives me knowledge of the maximum size of memory used, if that knowledge is required. Searching is faster in arrays than linked lists (although replacing, on average, is slower). Don't assume that static buffers are ALWAYS wrong.