Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 18 February 2008 04:20
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 3
Computer viruses and worms are incredibly good at spreading themselves
across the Internet, merrily infecting PCs with their dastardly
payloads. But what if that payload was beneficial, rather than harmful?
A Microsoft Research paper suggests these ‘friendly worms’ could be
helpful – but Sophos says this is pure ‘nonsense’ – and on this we heartily agree!
Internet security firm, Sophos, has come out strongly against the idea of turning ‘malware’ into ‘goodware’, where “someone reinvents the idea of harnessing the spreading ability of a computer virus, and of using the resulting 'power' as a vehicle for distributing updates or patches”.
This kind of warped thinking seems to pop up every few years, even I have wondered why, for example, the security companies couldn’t use ‘good botnets’ to defeat all the bad ones out there.
Sophos have brought the terrible notion of ‘good worms’ to our attention after they uncovered a 2007 Microsoft Research paper entitled “Sampling Strategies for Epidemic-Style Information Dissemination", which you can read
here.
Sophos says that the research paper “sports quite a few complicated-looking graphs, and enjoys what computer scientists call a 'high squiggle factor' (meaning that it is well-endowed with mathematical equations of considerable visual complexity)”.
Hilariously, Sophos have poked fun at the paper’s opening sentence, which couldn’t be more complicated for the everyday user to understand, with Sophos saying that the opening sentence of the paper doesn't make it obvious what the research is about.
The MS Research paper’s opening sentence is "We consider epidemic-style information dissemination stretegies that leverage the nonuniformity of host distribution over subnets to optimize the information spread."
However, you can never underestimate the power of a good journalist and editor to make the incomprehensible into something that anyone can understand, with New Scientist magazine featuring an
article which bears a much more understandable headline: "Friendly 'worms' could spread software fixes."
Sophos say that lead author Milan Vojnovic (of Microsoft Research) seems to confirm that this really is what the paper is about, telling New Scientist that "software patches that spread like worms could be faster and easier to distribute because no central server must bear all the load."
Now Sophos thinks this is all a load of patent rubbish – with their comments a must read over on page 2.
