Researcher: Stephen Greenberg
Project Director: George Kalb
Faculty Sponsor: Dr. Guiseppe Antiniese
Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, Maryland, USA
June, 2000
An Easter Egg is a piece of code inserted into a commercial software product that is not documented and is not meant to be a part of the product. The functionality of the Easter Egg is activated through an undocumented user action. Most Easter Eggs are not malicious in their actions and exist for purposes of amusement and/or to give credit to the developers of the software product. There are numerous websites that maintain a listing of commercial software products that are known to contain an Easter Egg along with a description of the Egg's functionality and activation mechanism. Currently, these Easter Eggs are readily dismissed as harmless nuisances that populate many of the commercial software products that are common within the marketplace. However, their very existence demonstrates that commercially distributed software products may contain more malicious Easter Egg functionality. This independent research project attempts to disclose the methods employed to introduce Easter Egg functionality into commercial software products, the techniques that are used to discover their activation mechanisms, and techniques that may be used to eradicate Easter Eggs.
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