Compsci boffin publishes proof-of-concept code for 54-year-old zero-day in Universal Turing Machine


A computer science professor from Sweden has discovered an arbitrary code execution vuln in the Universal Turing Machine, one of the earliest computer designs in history – though he admits it has “no real-world implications”.

In a paper published on academic repository ArXiv, Pontus Johnson, a professor at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, cheerfully explained that his findings wouldn’t be exploitable in a real-world scenario because it pertained specifically to the 1967 implementation of the simulated Universal Turing Machine (UTM) designed by the late Marvin Minsky, who co-founded the academic discipline of artificial intelligence.

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Source: The Register