November 24, 2009 | News

The wedge end of malware code can be made to resemble plain English text. That’s what Slashdot is reporting as the result of research presented at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security by security researchers Joshua Mason, Sam Small, Fabian Monrose, and Greg MacManus.

What they say in their paper is that normally it’s been assumed that executable code is fundamentally distinguishable from benign files. But given an hour or so on today’s computers, code can be fashioned which, viewed as text, would read as simple English prose.

The reason for this ambiguity is that, underneath it all, the English letters also have binary representations for their ASCII codes.  If the right sequence of characters is assembled, the resulting text will be executable 32-bit Intel architecture machine langauge.

Granted getting a system to execute such a file would be another matter. But that could probably be handled by any one of a number of other exploits.  After all, if security is thought of as being in layers, then attacks are in layers, too.

By the way, what’s meant by “shellcode” isn’t Bash Shell scripts or MS-DOS Shell batch files. It’s a term used by security researches to refer to the very first part of an exploit.

Read the paper here. The discussion on Slashdot is here. The story is being discussed on Remote Exploit Forums and createbacklinks.info.

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