07-10-2010, 04:04 PM
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Viruses Work ( Download Full Seminar Report )
A computer virus is a self-replicating program containing code that explicitly copies itself and that can "infect" other programs by modifying them or their environment such that a call to an infected program implies a call to a possibly evolved copy of the virus. These software "pranks" are very serious; they are spreading faster than they are being stopped, and even the least harmful of viruses could be life-threatening. For example, in the context of a hospital life-support system, a virus that "simply" stops a computer and displays a message until a key is pressed, could be fatal. Further, those who create viruses can not halt their spread, even if they wanted to. It requires a concerted effort from computer users to be "virus-aware", rather than continuing the ambivalence that has allowed computer viruses to become such a problem. Computer viruses are actually a special case of something known as "malicious logic" or "malware". COHEN'S theoretical definition of Computer Viruses Consider the set of programs which produce one or more programs as output. For any pair of programs p and q, p eventually produces q if and only if p produces q either directly or through a series of steps (the "eventually produces" relation is the transitive closure of the "produces" relation.) A viral set is a maximal set of programs V such that for every pair of programs p and q in V, p eventually produces q, and q eventually produces p. ("Maximal" here means that there is no program r not in the set that could be added to the set and have the set still satisfy the conditions.) For the purposes of this paper, a computer virus is a viral set; a program p is said to be an instance of, or to be infected with, a virus V precisely when p is a member of the viral set V. A program is said to be infected simpliciter when there is some viral set V of which it is a member. A program which is an instance of some virus is said to spread whenever it produces another instance of that virus. The simplest virus is a viral set that contains exactly one program, where that program simply produces itself. Larger sets represent polymorphic viruses, which have a number of different possible forms, all of which eventually produce all the others.
