Using mobile agent results to create hard-to-detect computer viruses
This work provides a theoretical proof for creating hard-to-detect viruses, which is incremental as it builds on existing virus theory but offers new insights into evasion techniques.
The paper addresses the long-standing open question of whether signature-free computer viruses can exist by introducing the concept of dynamic signatures and presenting a method to design viruses that are static signature-free and have hard-to-determine dynamic signatures, based on cryptographic assumptions.
The theory of computer viruses has been studied by several authors, though there is no systematic theoretical study up to now. The long time open question in this area is as follows: Is it possible to design a signature-free (including dynamic signatures which we will define late) virus? In this paper, we give an affirmative answer to this question from a theoretical viewpoint. We will introduce a new stronger concept: dynamic signatures of viruses, and present a method to design viruses which are static signature-free and whose dynamic signatures are hard to determine unless some cryptographic assumption fails. We should remark that our results are only for theoretical interest and may be resource intensive in practice.