Track papers across labs, topics, and trends.
Search papers, labs, and topics across Lattice.
This paper explores the capabilities of metamorphic viruses, which can generate an infinite variety of code variants while maintaining functionality, making them extremely difficult for current antivirus software to detect. By employing van Wijngaarden grammars, the authors demonstrate that these viruses can achieve full metamorphism, posing a significant challenge for antivirus technologies. The key finding emphasizes the necessity for antivirus solutions to incorporate Turing machines capable of recognizing the complex languages generated by these grammars to effectively combat such threats.
Metamorphic viruses can now evolve into infinitely diverse forms, rendering traditional antivirus solutions nearly obsolete.
Metamorphic viruses, currently the most advanced computer viruses in the wild, have the unique ability of mutating their own code virtually into infinitely many highly dissimilar copies of themselves that nevertheless have the same functionality. This ability -- metamorphism -- together with other advanced ob- fuscation techniques makes these computer viruses virtually undetectable by the antivirus software available in the market today. In this paper, we show that viral metamorphism is fully attainable by the employment of van Wijngaarden grammars. The challenge then for an antivirus software is to embed the Turing machine that decides the language generated by the grammar.