Worms of the future: Trying to exorcise the worst

Another "worst case" scenario, but this one has seen a few of the preditions (ie messing with debuggers) come true in the botnet world.

According to [Wikipedia], a worm could be defined as: a self-replicating computer program that does not need to be part of another program to propagate itself. This document is an attempt at predicting the worst possible future of worms, given the current computer science possibilities.

Up to now, we've seen many different kind of worms, each new generation improving on the precedent. The fact is that all such threats, for now, have suffered from a few vulnerabilities that prevented them (much to our relief) from functioning to their full potential. Some have achieved their result to a greater extent than others, but none of them seem to have realised the greatest fear: wreaking havoc on the Internet and on Informations Systems on a global scale (although some have come close).

This document tries to look at these present vulnerabilities from a security point of view (that is, by considering the Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability of worms) and in the next chapter, how to maintain these security requirements throughout the life-span of the worm, that is to say, as long as possible.

Following this, the document then attempts to provide hints on solutions that could be used in defense against new threats.

As it has been pointed out to me, other similar papers exist, one of them being [Warhol]. Surely a nice complementary reading to this paper.

Source: Worms of the future: Trying to exorcise the worst, by Nicolas Stampf.