New Binary Diffing Algorithm Announced By Google

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 16, 2009 @05:20AM from the smartness-and-light dept.

bheer writes "Today Google's Open-Source Chromium project announced a new compression technique called Courgette geared towards distributing really small updates. Courgette achieves smaller diffs (about 9x in one example) than standard binary-diffing algorithms like bsdiff by disassembling the code and sending the assembler diffs over the wire. This, the Chromium devs say, will allow them to send smaller, more frequent updates, making users more secure. Since this will be released as open source, it should make distributing updates a lot easier for the open-source community."

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Solving the wrong problem by Animats · 2009-07-16 05:40 · Score: 0, Flamebait

A better binary diffing algorithm is useful for source control. But for security? If the code is so awful that the bandwidth required for security updates is a problem, the product is defective by design.
It sounds like Google tried "agile programming" on trusted code, and now has to deal with the consequences of debugging a pile of crap.