Although artificial intelligence is constantly improving, we’re still far from it writing software. For now, we, human beings, are the only ones that know how to write software, and while we can be excellent at it, we’ll never be perfect. This means that there will always be at least few coding mistakes that malicious hackers will be able to exploit. For example, a single bug can open the door to a hacker copying credit card numbers or deleting extremely important files – this is serious business, as you can see.
The good news is that the researchers at the Colombia Universtity have developed a new software called Shuffler that is able to stop such attacks by allowing programs to continuously scramble their code as they run.
“Shuffler makes it nearly impossible to turn a bug into a functioning attack, defending software developers from their mistakes,” said David Williams-King, new study’s lead author. “Attackers are unable to figure out the program’s layout if the code keeps changing.”
Shuffler is fast, user-friendly and it runs alongside the code it defends without making modifications to program compilers or to the computer’s OS. In fact, it’s so efficient that it randomizes itself to defend against possible bugs in its own code!
However, researchers say that the software needs a few more improvements before it’s made public. They want to make Shuffler easier to use on software they haven’t yet tested, and improve its ability to defend against attacks that take advantage of server crashes.
Source:
Columbia University In The City of New York (http://datascience.columbia.edu/new-software-continuously-scrambles-code-foil-cyber-attacks)
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