An entity claiming to be Murray Hayes wrote: : : : As far as bit patterns go, is executable code random? : : mhayes@infomatch.com : : It's better for us if you don't understand : It's better for me if you don't understand : -Tragically Hip : Nope, any executable has the same text-data-stack structure. Within the text segment, all instructions are (usually) of the same size with one to four possible formats. Consider that every instruction will begin with one of ~128 opcodes, operands are pretty predictable depending on the opcode's associated format. Any references to symbol and literal tables are within a predictable range, and the format of these tables is fixed. An assembled/linked program is going to be very far from random, same basic patterns are used for I/O, subroutine calls, iterative loops, etc. I would assume that the entropy of an executable binary is extremely low. mark -- [] Mark Rogaski [] wendigo@pobox.com [] http://www.pobox.com/~wendigo/ [] >> finger for PGP pubkey <<