Polymorphic Malware: Mutation Engine vs Signature Detection

Real-world malware families like polymorphic viruses and packers survive antivirus scans by rewriting their own byte pattern on every copy while keeping the part that actually does the damage untouched. This simulator renders a malware sample as a 64-byte genome laid out as a 3D grid of instanced blocks: an outer ring of polymorphic "shell" bytes that mutate randomly each generation, and an inner core of payload bytes that never change. A signature-based scanner measures the Hamming distance between the current genome and its original fingerprint, flagging a match only while that distance stays under a configurable threshold — watch how raising the mutation rate lets the sample slip past static detection within a handful of generations, and how a behavior-based heuristic engine, tuned by its own sensitivity slider, keeps a independent chance of catching the invariant payload no matter how the shell scrambles.