Software That Fixes Itself
A new tool aims to fix misbehaving programs without shutting them down.
...I'm sure the real-world intent is for post-release bugtesting and internal development procedures.
On the not-so-nice side, it may run into problems with violating licenses for changing binaries. Not sure about that. It shouldn't be a problem though.
...-Renegade (November 01, 2010, 10:16 AM)
...Sure, but it would probably be safer and more useful to use the underlying routines to find and report bugs at runtime, rather than patching the binary for the end user, which I think is a recipe for disaster.
It would be very neat to have that as an add-in component for your software to let you know about errors, fix them, and get you the solution for them for the next release. :)
I wonder what would happen if you ran an application vanilla and it learned what is "normal", then later installed a plugin that added additional functionality through dll injection. Would this thing patch the exectutable to neutralize any attempts to use those dll injection plugins? I know a whole lot of people that would be mighty angry if it did.Depends on who's actually using it and what the capabilities of the software are.-app103 (November 01, 2010, 10:30 AM)
Seems to me like Microsoft devs might also have an easier time of it if they set up a whole roomful of these things pecking away at various Windows components...Microsoft are already doing a lot of interesting things security-wise, but Windows is a doyc-damn huge beast... and there's a lot of different ways to exploit software.-Edvard (November 01, 2010, 10:52 AM)
Interesting idea, but I'm not sure it's something that should be running on end-user's computers.I TOTALLY agree. *shivers*-f0dder (November 01, 2010, 12:22 PM)
...Good point.
And just how does it detect exploits? The article keeps mentioning crashes... a successful exploit doesn't crash the app it's taking over.
True, but if this system is able to crack showstopper bugs on the order of minutes to hours, a lot of stuff could be cranked through fairly efficiently.Seems to me like Microsoft devs might also have an easier time of it if they set up a whole roomful of these things pecking away at various Windows components...Microsoft are already doing a lot of interesting things security-wise, but Windows is a doyc-damn huge beast... and there's a lot of different ways to exploit software.-Edvard (November 01, 2010, 10:52 AM)