Timeline for Is It Possible for a Universally-Executable Virus to be Written in Binary?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
24 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jun 22 at 23:51 | comment | added | John B. Lambe | In a fictitious world, you could have a combination of computer architectures (potentially all systems in your world) for which this is possible. In the real world, there would be some combinations of systems for which it would be possible, but probably not all. The virus writer would have to craft a machine code sequence (any such sequence would have a different interpretation on each architecture), such that its interpretation on each architecture would cause a jump to the main code for that architecture (a different program for each one), as demonstrated in @potestasity's answer. | |
| Apr 12, 2022 at 15:23 | review | Suggested edits | |||
| Apr 12, 2022 at 15:31 | |||||
| Nov 11, 2019 at 4:49 | comment | added | Patricia Shanahan | As far as being able to infect multiple types of machines is concerned, writing in machine code would make the virus less portable. The ones that can infect multiple machines depend on very high level features, such as SQL, that are implemented on many different hardware designs. | |
| Nov 10, 2019 at 14:41 | answer | added | Yakk | timeline score: 0 | |
| Oct 4, 2019 at 13:55 | answer | added | potestasity | timeline score: 6 | |
| Sep 24, 2019 at 18:55 | comment | added | jdunlop | Sorry, @overlord, but the edit actually made this question substantially more wrong. I can laboriously write an encryption program in assembly or machine code, and then write the decryption program in C#. The mechanism by which one enters instructions into a computer does not in any way limit how counter-instructions can be written. | |
| Sep 24, 2019 at 13:51 | history | edited | overlord | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
edited body
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| Sep 24, 2019 at 13:34 | vote | accept | overlord | ||
| Sep 24, 2019 at 13:15 | history | edited | overlord | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Clarfication
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| Sep 24, 2019 at 3:03 | comment | added | AlexP | The phrase "wrote a virus in binary code" has no meaning, unless you tell us what specific "binary code" that is. (Think of a "code" as a table associating values to be encoded with their representation. For example, in ASCII, the letter A has code point 65, binary 01101001; in EBCDIC, the the same letter A has code point 193, binary 11000011.) And you definitely need to tell us when this happened -- 1960s? 1970s? 2000s? Today? Because this determines the number of different machine architectures and operating systems on the Internet. | |
| Sep 24, 2019 at 1:20 | answer | added | The Square-Cube Law | timeline score: 1 | |
| Sep 24, 2019 at 1:08 | answer | added | Shadowzee | timeline score: 0 | |
| Sep 24, 2019 at 0:59 | comment | added | Hypnosifl | @jdunlop edited the question so "possible for a virus" was changed to "possible for a universally-executable virus"--overlord, can you comment on whether this accurately reflects the intent of your question? You did say that it "infects every computer-based system" but you didn't specify whether that's because in this science-fiction setting all computers happened to share the same machine language, or the virus was designed with a specific set of machine languages in mind, or because the virus will somehow work on all possible machine languages. | |
| Sep 24, 2019 at 0:36 | answer | added | Ryan_L | timeline score: 31 | |
| Sep 24, 2019 at 0:15 | comment | added | Ray Butterworth | @benrg, and I'm reminded that what we call Arabic numerals are what are used in non-Arabic countries. In Arabic countries different symbols are used. E.g. the digit "٦" represents six, not seven. Eastern Arabic numerals - Wikipedia | |
| Sep 24, 2019 at 0:03 | history | edited | jdunlop | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Edited title for clarity
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| Sep 23, 2019 at 21:52 | answer | added | Andrey | timeline score: 4 | |
| Sep 23, 2019 at 21:33 | comment | added | benrg | (I'm reminded of the bit in The Phantom Tollbooth where the Mathemagician sends Azaz a letter written entirely in Arabic numerals, and when Milo says that Azaz might not understand it, the Mathemagician says "Nonsense! Everybody understands numbers. A seven is a seven everywhere in the world." Every computer understands binary in the same way that every human understands numbers.) | |
| Sep 23, 2019 at 21:29 | comment | added | benrg | You could write it in binary but it wouldn't magically work on every computer-based system just because it was in binary. If your real question is whether binary code has some sort of universality property, the answer is no. | |
| Sep 23, 2019 at 21:28 | comment | added | overlord | @Hypnosifl I am aware of this; this was the original inspiration for my idea. | |
| Sep 23, 2019 at 21:24 | comment | added | Hypnosifl | Computer viruses are just types of programs, and all computer programs are ultimately translated into machine code to be executed by the CPU, machine code is in binary. | |
| Sep 23, 2019 at 21:24 | answer | added | bytepusher | timeline score: -2 | |
| Sep 23, 2019 at 21:22 | answer | added | stix | timeline score: 8 | |
| Sep 23, 2019 at 21:07 | history | asked | overlord | CC BY-SA 4.0 |