Month: September 2022

GENOME IS LESS FRAGILE THAN DIGITAL CODE. "Genes apparently can tolerate a higher percentage of errors than computer code or written text. Sixty-one codons code for only twenty amino acids, so many of the codons are synonymous. Also, proteins can tolerate amino acid substitutions at many positions without losing their function." https://lnkd.in/dH9XaVn View in LinkedIn

BINARY CODE BRITTLENESS. "Researchers that envisioned how autonomously evolving malware could be coded have largely focused on binary code manipulation. The high percentage of lethal mutations that would be experienced by such malware (due to the brittleness of the code) would forbid evolution from occurring." https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

CODING: NONCODING GENE RATIO. "If the proportion of functional gene-length strands of DNA to nonfunctional ones is not as low as we actually find in nature — (10^12 different genes) x (10^25 estimated average number of functional alleles each) / (10^600 possible sequences) = 10^-563 conservatively — but is as high as 10^-10, say, this situation would lead to something like a "many worlds" theory of evolution." https://lnkd.in/dH9XaVn View in LinkedIn

RARE CODING SEQUENCES. "This situation would make the genetic code different from other codes such as computer code or written text. In these codes, the ratio of meaningful to meaningless sequences (of information content similar to that of an average gene — 1,000 nucleotides = 2,000 bits = 250 bytes) in random sequence space is so low that the chance of finding a meaningful one in only 10^5 or 10^10 or even 10^25 trials is effectively zero. Perhaps the genetic code is so different, but this difference has not been demonstrated." https://lnkd.in/dH9XaVn View in LinkedIn

POOR SAFETY NET. "No virus detection algorithm can detect all possible viruses, known and unknown." https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

MOSTLY HARMLESS. "It is clear that the emergence of an evolvable threat could be potentially disastrous. On the other hand, it is entirely possible that evolution will in most cases lead to harmless forms of a threat, as is often observed in biology." Cold comfort for the small percentage of disastrous threats. https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

BREEDING MALWARE. "A threat might be able to snatch code from another program in its environment. We have seen examples of a virus like Pinfi jumping on top of worms to replicate in new environments as a combination threat. Security products do not always recognize the worm once it is infected with a virus, and the combination helps the survival of both threats." https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

HYBRID CODE. "It is conceivable that an evolutionary function in the malware could snatch clean or malicious code from other programs. It could integrate code from other programs by identifying function prolog and epilog code." https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

SHARING GENES. "Even complete functionality might be snatched from another clean program, or another virus as well. As previously predicted, a cooperation protocol can enhance sharing of features between malicious executables as well. Code snatching is a tried and true function of almost all biological organisms." https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

CO-INFECTION. "A form of evolution was observed in macro viruses, which often merge their code base into a document. Often the file has a clean macro, and a virus with a set of macros. In addition, another virus may insert its set of macros at the same time, leading to viral macro code merging with both viral and clean macro code. In biology, this phenomenon is quite common, and known as coinfection." https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn