The topic of whether self-propagating code can have a good use has cropped up occasionally among researchers in the security community. In 1994, a paper written by antivirus researcher Vesselin Bontchev concluded that ‘good’ viruses are possible, but the safeguards and limitations on the programs would mean that the resulting code would not resemble what most people considered a virus. Later attempts at creating ‘good’ worms have failed, however, mainly because the writers have not adopted many of the safeguards outlined in the Bontchev paper. The Welchia worm–a variant of the MSBlast, or Blaster, worm–had apparently been created to fix the vulnerability exploited by the MSBlast worm, but had serious programming errors that caused the program to scan so aggressively for new hosts, it effectively shut down many corporate networks.
Immunity’s research is the latest attempt to create a more rigorously conceived framework for creating worms that could spread across specific networks to find and report vulnerabilities. The research essentially offers two advances, a strategy for the controlled propagation of worms and a framework in which reliable worms could be created quickly, Aitel said. The nematode worms would have to get permission to spread by querying a central server for a specific digital token, which Aitel dubbed a nematoken, before spreading to a particular machine.
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