Imparting Malware Resistance With a Randomizing Compiler 125
First time accepted submitter wheelbarrio (1784594) writes with this news from the Economist: "Inspired by the natural resistance offered to pathogens by genetically diverse host populations, Dr Michael Franz at UCI suggests that common software be similarly hardened against attack by generating a unique executable for each install. It sounds like a cute idea, although the article doesn't provide examples of what kinds of diversity are possible whilst maintaining the program logic, nor what kind of attacks would be prevented with this approach." This might reduce the value of MD5 sums, though.
Re:Would cause major debugging headaches (Score:5, Funny)
Ahh, but don't forget the benefits! If random bugs could appear or disappear on installs, think of how much tech support time you can save by just saying "Re-install it and you'll be fine."
Half the time that's what they do now anyways, now you can replace ALL the calls with that!
Gentoo (Score:5, Funny)
You can already do this with Gentoo, you're highly unlikely to use the same combination of compiler, kernel, assembler, libraries, use flags, compiler flags etc as anyone else...