An Abstract Theory of Computer Viruses
CRYPTO '88 Proceedings of the 8th Annual International Cryptology Conference on Advances in Cryptology
Turing machines, transition systems, and interaction
Information and Computation
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A computer virus is a program that can generate possibly evolved copies of itself when it runs on a computer utilizing the machine’s resources, and by some means each copy may be propagated to another computer in which the copy will have a chance to get executed. And we call a virus instance as a viral agent since it is autonomous during its execution by choosing what action to perform in the computer without a user’s intervention. In the paper we develop a computational model of viral agents based on the persistent Turing machine (PTM) model which is a canonical model for sequential interaction. The model reveals the most essential infection property of computer viruses well and overcomes the inherent deficiency of Turing machine (TM) virus models in expressing interaction. Then on that basis we deduce several helpful theorems about viral agents. Finally we also discuss modeling of viral agent dynamics with cellular automata (CAs) and get some useful results.