Imparting Malware Resistance With a Randomizing Compiler

First time accepted submitter wheelbarrio (1784594) writes with this news from the Economist: "Inspired by the natural resistance offered to pathogens by genetically diverse host populations, Dr Michael Franz at UCI suggests that common software be similarly hardened against attack by generating a unique executable for each install. It sounds like a cute idea, although the article doesn't provide examples of what kinds of diversity are possible whilst maintaining the program logic, nor what kind of attacks would be prevented with this approach." This might reduce the value of MD5 sums, though.

Comments

Re:Would cause major debugging headaches

[Anonymous Coward]

The randomizing compiler could easily be designed to base it's randomizations on a seed, and then include that seed in the obj headers and stack dump trace library of the libc it links against. Then the bug would be just as reproducable as with a standard compiler.