Towards Automated Malware Creation: Code Generation and Code Integration

The analogies between computer malware and biological viruses are more than obvious. The very idea of an artificial ecosystem where malicious software can evolve and autonomously find new, more effective ways of attacking legitimate programs and damaging sensitive information is both terrifying and fascinating. The paper proposes two different ways for exploiting an evolutionary algorithm to devise malware: the former targeting heuristic-based antivirus scanner; the latter optimizing a Trojan attack. Testing the stability of a system against a malware-based attack, or checking the reliability of the heuristic scan of anti-virus software against an original malware application could be interesting for the research community and advantageous to the IT industry. Experimental results shows the feasibility of the proposed approaches on simple real-world test cases.