A means of attaining richer, more comprehensive forms of software diversity on a mass scale is proposed through leveraging and repurposing a closely related, yet heretofore untapped, line of computer science research-automatic program synthesis. It is argued that the search-based methodologies presently used for obtaining implementations from specifications can be broadened relatively easily to a search for many candidate solutions, potentially diversifying the software monoculture. Small-scale experiments using the Rosette synthesis tool o↵er preliminary support for this proposed approach. But the possible rewards are not without danger: It is argued that the same approach can power a dangerous new level of sophistication for malware mutation and reactively adaptive software threats. CCS Concepts •Security and privacy ! Software security engineering; •Software and its engineering ! Source code generation; Automatic programming; Search-based software engineering;
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