Comment Re:Excellent Presentation (Score 3, Informative) 291
First, I would not say that they can convert arbitrary shell code to English-like prose. Rather, the only instructions that can be used are the ones that are identical to the ASCII encoding of the alphabet. For instance, the ASCII encoding of the letter "r" is identical to the binary for the unconditional jmp instruction. Granted, the authors showed that you can do a lot with this limited set of instructions, but I still wouldn't call it arbitrary.
According to the PDF it does convert arbitrary shell code. FTA: What follows is a brief description of the method we have developed for encoding arbitrary shellcode as English text... It looks like they can encode anything once they have built an English-like decoder (judging by their language and the 3rd figure).
The tight constraints on the instructions that can be encoded into ASCII make crafting decent English syntax nearly impossible. Spam filters based on natural language processing could probably detect and flag them.
If they were sending SPAM... which they aren't.
