Year: 2022

AUTONOMOUS CODE. "Viv’s biggest secret is the technology to bring the different services together on the fly to respond to requests for which it hasn’t been specifically programmed. “It is a program that writes its own program, which is the only way you can scale thousands of services working together that know nothing about one another." Given inevitable errors, this is akin to genetic variation." https://lnkd.in/deszndk View in LinkedIn

"SELF-MODIFYING CODE is code that alters its own instructions while it is executing - usually to reduce the instruction path length and improve performance or simply to reduce otherwise repetitively similar code, thus simplifying maintenance." https://lnkd.in/ddCjHJk View in LinkedIn

WIDELY USED. "Self-modifying code (SMC), in this paper, broadly refers to any program that loads, generates, or mutates code at runtime. It is widely used in many of the world’s critical software systems to support runtime code generation and optimization, dynamic loading and linking, OS boot loader, just-in-time compilation, binary translation, or dynamic code encryption and obfuscation." https://lnkd.in/dzAS74T View in LinkedIn

"SELF-MODIFYING CODE is used to build worms and viruses." https://lnkd.in/dcT_V2k View in LinkedIn

OBFUSCATING CODE. "There are many reasons to protect a program’s implementation details. Commercial entities generally do so in an attempt to preserve the secrecy of algorithms and pro- tocols that are considered to provide a competitive advantage. While crackers and cyber criminals share this goal, they also seek to confound defense systems, postpone their detection and eventual tracing." https://lnkd.in/dHTSZ_H View in LinkedIn

CODE VERSUS DATA. "Self-modifying code weakens the distinction between program code and data." https://lnkd.in/dHTSZ_H View in LinkedIn

"SELF-MODIFYING CODE allows for code injection attacks such as “Stack smashing”, “Format string attacks” and many others. In these attacks, the injected code is written to a program’s memory as input data to which control is subsequently transferred. The majority of attacks of this kind are prevented today at the hardware level by marking writable memory pages as non-executable." https://lnkd.in/dHTSZ_H View in LinkedIn

VALUABLE TOOL. "Self-modifying code is a piece of software which achieves its goal by rewriting itself as it goes along. It is almost universally Considered Harmful now, but it used to be a neat trick in the toolbox of programmers of small or old computers." https://lnkd.in/dknBRJD View in LinkedIn

MORE EFFICIENT. "Code that's capable of altering its own instructions while it's still executing has been around for a while. Typically, it's done to reduce the instruction path length and improve performance, or to simply reduce repetitively similar code. But for all intents and purposes, there are no self-aware, self-improving AI systems today." https://lnkd.in/dp3ZKye View in LinkedIn

SHOWN VERSUS ACTUAL CODE. "Self modifying code is a phrase used to describe programs that are able to change themselves. Using self modifying code can make it harder to reverse engineer a program, largely because the ‘actual code may differ from that shown’. That is, the actual code that ends up executing may be different from the code that is first shown during disassembly." https://lnkd.in/dU6pj5j View in LinkedIn