Secure Coding mailing list archives
Genotypes and Phenotypes
From: steingra at gmail.com (Andy Steingruebl)
Date: Sun, 18 Oct 2009 08:28:32 -0700
On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 9:55 AM, Gunnar Peterson <gunnar at arctecgroup.net> wrote:
Its been awhile since there was a bugs vs flaws debate, so here is a snippet from Jaron Lanier A: No, no, they're not. What's the difference between a bug and a variation or an imperfection? If you think about it, if you make a small change to a program, it can result in an enormous change in what the program does. If nature worked that way, the universe would crash all the time. Certainly there wouldn't be any evolution or life. There's something about the way complexity builds up in nature so that if you have a small change, it results in sufficiently small results; it's possible to have incremental evolution. Right now, we have a little bit -- not total -- but a little bit of linearity in the connection between genotype and phenotype, if you want to speak in those terms. But in software, there's a chaotic relationship between the source code (the "genotype") and the observed effects of programs -- what you might call the "phenotype" of a program.
Is this really true though? A small change in libc doesn't change the whole look and feel of a word processing program. It looks exactly the same, but maybe behaves very slightly differently over a small range of inputs, etc. And, while not being an expert in biology, I'm quite certain that there are very minor mutations in certain key places that result in complete system failure or almost entirely fatal diseases, conditions, etc. Is the complexity and expression of it really the key piece here? Or is it general resilience against failure, complexity spread out so that the common enemies (transcription errors in one place) aren't fatal. The system is designed against different threat models. -- Andy Steingruebl steingra at gmail.com
Current thread:
- Genotypes and Phenotypes Gunnar Peterson (Oct 12)
- Genotypes and Phenotypes Andy Steingruebl (Oct 18)