From: phardie@nastar.uucp (Pete Hardie)
Subject: Re: Beneficial Virus?
Organization: Digital Transmission Systems, Duluth, GA.
Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1993 15:17:21 GMT

In article <C0IDMu.By5@panix.com> rpowers@panix.com (Richard Powers) writes:
>In <1993Jan7.152339.25886@nastar.uucp> phardie@nastar.uucp (Pete Hardie) writes:
>>If I do not know the virus is in place on the multi0user system (and if it
>
>How would you not know it is in place?  You would have had to place it
>there yourself.  Or at very least placed the marker file.

<sigh>

It's a *multi-user* system.  Another user could have installed it.  I might
NOT be the owner.

>All it needs to "deserve" the name virus is the ability to replicate
>itself.  

More on this later.

>>Not necessarily.  Some systems operate user accounts under suffrance - you
>>get only what the admins allow.  Others allow privacy, but do not guarantee
>>anything else.  The raw format of the data is not usually guaranteed, like
>>the position of files on a disk is not guaranteed.
>
>I'm not sure what you're getting at here.  If the system in question
>has no guarantees about anything, I don't want to be on the system,
>BCV or not.

Does the sysadmin at your school/business always tell you when s/he installs
something new?  Swaps out one disk for another?  etc, etc.

If I am a user on a multi-user system, and the admin has installed this BCV
several years ago, I do not necessarily get *any* information about it or
its presence onthe system.

>>An admin who installed a device driver that compressed all files would
>>be doing the same thing, in essence, and would not be likely to tell the
>>users, except as bragging about the regained disk space :-)
>
>IMO _if_ the existence of the virus will have any impact on the users,
>the admin has an obligation to notify those users.  This is not the
>same as a device driver.  With a device driver the effects should be
>totally transparent to the user.  And again, if it is _not_
>transparent, then the users should know.

From the descriptions of the BCV, if the marker file is present, it *IS*
totally transparent.  How will I know, if I arrive after the installation
of the BCV, that it is in place?

>>>(1) Remove itself.  The BCV would decompress the file and then save it
>
>>This would be the only ethical option for a 'beneficial virus', IMHO.
>
>Not this method alone, IMHO.  If you have so much of your usable disk
>space compressed that not everything will fit uncompressed, then this
>method alone would be disastrous.

If the marker file is gone, the re-compression code is gone, right?  Every
executable will be decompressed over time, leading to this very state.

>>This starts to make the program less of a virus, since it becomes more of
>>a system utility.
>
>It is a virus because it replicates itself.  Period.

I don't think so.

Computer virii are called that for their similarity to bilogical virii, which
are simply 'core' of DNA that use *another* cell to reproduce.  I can write a
program that will replicate itself, but unless it *resides within* another
executable, and *inserts itself* into other executables, it's not a VIRUS,
it's a WORM.  A virus is (in the canonical definition) a self-contained code
fragment that resides in an executable, and copies itself into other 
executables.  If the marker file was just a flag, you'd still have a virus, but
once it starts being code, you no longer have a virus.  I'm not sure if there
is a good term for what it is, however.

>>It also makes it possible for a user to infect a system without the
>>owner's knowledge.
>
>I assume you are referring to method (4)?  I covered that above.  Read
>the underlined again.
>    ^^^^^^^^^^

No.  I meant that Joe User could install the virus and marker file on the
multi-user system run by Mary Sysadmin.

>The whole idea has involved from the original to deal with a lot of
>nitpicking problems.  The original context was a hypothetical concept
>to refute the idea that a beneficial virus is inherently _impossible_.

Define beneficial.  Now get 100 people to agree with you.

That's the problem with a beneficial virus - we don't all agree that X action
is always beneficial.

-- 
Pete Hardie:  phardie@nastar  (voice) (404) 497-0101
Digital Transmission Systems, Inc., Duluth GA
Member, DTS Dart Team           |  cat * | egrep -v "signature virus|infection" 
Position:  Goalie               |