Question

“S-W-Y-M”, short for “sympathize with your machinery”, is the quirky abbreviation for this operation in Donald Knuth’s machine architecture MMIX (“M-mix”). One of the main kinds of modules in Metasploit is a “generator” that produces variations on this operation, which can bypass malware detectors that flag long sequences of these operations. In RISC-V (“risk five”), this operation (15[1])can be encoded as three null (15[1])bytes followed by the byte (15[1])0x13 (“hex 1 3”), and in x86 (“x eighty-six”), this is simply encoded as a single byte 0x90 (“hex 9 0”). These operations are useful for constructing exploits when the target of a jump cannot be precisely controlled because you can just place a bunch of them before your (*) shellcode, in what is known as a “slide” or “sled” of these operations. (10[1])This assembly instruction is equivalent to Python’s “pass” statement. For 10 points, name this computer instruction that doesn’t do anything. ■END■ (10[1])

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