[121954] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: defending against evil in all layers of hardware and software
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Perry E. Metzger)
Tue Apr 29 11:38:12 2008
To: Stephan Neuhaus <neuhaus@st.cs.uni-sb.de>
Cc: John Denker <jsd@av8n.com>, Cryptography <cryptography@metzdowd.com>
From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>
Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2008 09:13:00 -0400
In-Reply-To: <0F5A368C-A92E-448B-A62E-08894F5D41FC@st.cs.uni-sb.de> (Stephan Neuhaus's message of "Tue\, 29 Apr 2008 08\:16\:28 +0200")
Stephan Neuhaus <neuhaus@st.cs.uni-sb.de> writes:
> On Apr 28, 2008, at 23:56, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
>
>> If you have a rotten apple engineer, he will be able to hide what he's
>> trying to do and make it look completely legit. If he's really good,
>> it may not be possible to catch what he's done EVEN IN PRINCIPLE.
>
> Fred Cohen proved in 1984 in his "Computer Viruses, Theory and
> Experiments"[1] that "Program P is a virus" is undecidable.
He needn't have bothered. All non-trivial properties of programs
are undecidable. Rice's Theorem, you know. Such a proof is one line --
you need merely assert that "X is a virus" is a non-trivial property
(that is, a property that is only true of some programs).
Perry
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