
METAMORPHISM AND PERMUTATION: FEEL THE DIFFERENCE
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Tasks of the metamorphism and permutation technologies are to make virus
more complex, thus
1. prolonging time of writing antiviral code, and
2. increasing time of the infected objects detection.

But, contrary to public opinion,
implementations of these techonogies are different!

Metamorphism means that your virus contains some [encrypted] data
which is used to generate new polymorphic copy.

As a rule, new polymorphic copy will be only executed after its
generation, so it may contain any trash instructions and be of any size.

Typical metamorphic viruses are TMC and LEXOTAN.

Permutating viruses are NOT containing such encrypted data, they are
using only current code to generate new polymorphic copy.

Permutating virus always must be able to get length of any own instruction.
This may be achieved by writing disassembler (ZCME,RPME) or making
all instructions of the same length (in the PLY-viruses all instructions
are NOP-padded to 3-byte length).

So, metamorphism means GENERATING NEW CODE,
and permutation means USING OLD CODE.

                                                                   Z0MBiE
