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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

Could it finally revolutionize porting Linux to new architectures?

I never thought about it but one day AI will port itself to another device. That’s a crazy thought.

We'll probably see that happen in professional malware first.

TBH, if I recall correctly, something similar happened already in the past just by pure coincidence. I'm pretty sure somebody somewhere already experiments with self-porting AI malware.

“AI” malware? Is this like calling any internet enabled thing “smart”? Any cool features are AI or is this something else?

Also, if it can happen by accident then I don't really think it should be called "porting". You don't find that a linux-centric malware has "accidentally" "ported" itself to windows, likewise Intel bytecode doesn't suddenly execute on ARM chips.

The difference between "porting" and "modifying" has (at least in everything I've read in "hacker" culture) always been that porting is rarely a trivial act.

I suppose in theory malware that targets dev tools and source to infect compiled code could end up getting ported along with it’s target. More hitching a ride than porting itself though.

It refers to things like software that reads documentation, reverse engineers code running on the target system, works backwards from the target CPU manual and compiler toolchain to make object code that runs on the CPU, and generally does what a human does when porting code to run on another system possibly without a compiler and take advantage of flaws on the target.

I think we're half way there already, because of the number of tools for decompiling and code scanning for security vectors these days, the increasing use of fuzzers to discover unintended or undocumented features, including hardware features like undocumented instructions, and increasingly clever and subtle side-channel attacks for finding device state that is not supposed to be visible to software.

The only instance somewhat like this that I am aware of is that two malware samples sort of 'recombined' accidentally.

One was a worm that packaged itself up and sent itself around, the other did some sort of injection or binary patching and happened to piggyback onto the worm.

So basically one virus infected another virus in such a way that they became symbiotic? Cool.

This is how you get Skynet.

We'll surely need to pivot to a blockchain solution first.

Now you’ve got two problems.

I realize you’re joking, but it’s possible. Learning compilation targets is an active area of compiler research with some promising results in the past year or two.

machine-learning powered linux ports?

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