71 I've heard talk of "good viruses". Is it possible to use a computer virus for something useful? (Computer virus)
Description
This article is from the Computer Viruses FAQ, by Nick FitzGerald n.fitzgerald@csc.canterbury.ac.nz with numerous contributions by others.
71 I've heard talk of "good viruses". Is it possible to use a computer virus for something useful? (Computer virus)
A very hotly debated topic that has flared-up dramatically several times
in Virus-L/comp.virus. The answer to this is not simple and largely
hinges on your definition or interpretation of the term computer virus.
By definition (see B1), viruses do not have to do something "bad"
(although many people argue that the uninvited "resource wasting" that
is almost inherent in viral activity is necessarily bad). From this
point (and based on his somewhat esoteric definition of the term
computer virus) Fred Cohen has argued that "good" or "useful" computer
viruses are a serious possibility. In fact, Dr. Cohen offered a reward
of $1000 for the first clearly "useful" virus--despite several potential
claimants, however, he hasn't paid up.
Although there has never been a position that was widely agreed upon as
a result of any of these discussions, many contributors to this forum
believe that there are serious problems with the idea of implementing
useful computing functionality through self-replicating programs.
Vesselin Bontchev's paper originally delivered at the 1994 EICAR
conference, titled "Are `Good' Computer Viruses Still a Bad Idea?", is
available by anonymous FTP from ftp.informatik.uni-hamburg.de (IP =
134.100.4.42), as pub/virus/texts/viruses/goodvir.zip. *Anyone* wishing
to raise this discussion in Virus-L/comp.virus again should read and
carefully consider this paper before posting. It contains many strong
arguments against the idea of "good computer viruses", and some
prescriptions of how good viruses would have to be implemented and
distributed to deserve the label "good". To date no strong arguments
countering the points in this paper or otherwise arguing in favor of the
concept of good viruses have been posted to the group.
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