Finding Substitutable Binary Code for Reverse Engineering by Synthesizing Adapters

Vaibhav Sharma, Kesha Hietala, Stephen McCamant

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

6 Scopus citations

Abstract

Independently developed codebases typically contain many segments of code that perform the same or closely related operations. Being able to detect these related segments is helpful to applications such as reverse engineering. In this paper, we tackle the problem of determining whether two segments of binary code perform the same operation by asking whether one segment can be substituted by the other. A key insight behind our approach is that because these segments often have different interfaces, some glue code (an adapter) will be needed to perform the substitution. Here we present an algorithm that searches for substitutable code segments by attempting to synthesize an adapter between them. We implement our technique using concrete adapter enumeration and binary symbolic execution to explore the relation between size of adapter search space and total search time. Then, using more than 61,000 fragments of binary code extracted from a ARM image built for the iPod Nano 2g device and functions from the VLC media player, we evaluate our adapter synthesis implementation on more than one million synthesis tasks. Our tool finds dozens of instances of VLC functions in the firmware image. These results confirm that instances of adaptably substitutable binary functions exist in real-world code, and suggest that adapter synthesis has promising reverse engineering applications.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2018 IEEE 11th International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation, ICST 2018
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages150-160
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)9781538650127
DOIs
StatePublished - May 25 2018
Event11th IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation, ICST 2018 - Vasteras, Sweden
Duration: Apr 9 2018Apr 13 2018

Publication series

NameProceedings - 2018 IEEE 11th International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation, ICST 2018

Other

Other11th IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation, ICST 2018
Country/TerritorySweden
CityVasteras
Period4/9/184/13/18

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 IEEE.

Keywords

  • binary analysis
  • program synthesis
  • symbolic execution

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