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Recovering High-Level Conditions from Binary Programs

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FM 2016: Formal Methods (FM 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 9995))

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Abstract

The need to get confidence in binary programs without access to their source code has pushed efforts forward to directly analyze executable programs. However, low-level programs lack high-level structures (such as types, control-flow graph, etc.), preventing the straightforward application of source-code analysis techniques. Especially, conditional jumps rely on low-level flag predicates, whereas they often encode high-level “natural” conditions on program variables. Most static analyzers are unable to infer any interesting information from these low-level conditions, leading to serious precision loss compared with source-level analysis. In this paper, we propose template-based recovery, an automatic approach for retrieving high-level predicates from their low-level flag versions. Especially, the technique is sound, efficient, platform-independent and it achieves very high ratio of recovery. This method allows more precise analyses and helps to understand machine encoding of conditionals rather than relying on error-prone human interpretation or (syntactic) pattern-based reasoning.

Work partially funded by ANR, grant 12-INSE-0002.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. CEA, LIST, Université Paris-Saclay, Gif-sur-Yvette, France

    Adel Djoudi & Sébastien Bardin

  2. Lix, École Polytechnique, CNRS, Université Paris-Saclay, 91128, Palaiseau, France

    Éric Goubault

Authors
  1. Adel Djoudi
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  2. Sébastien Bardin
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  3. Éric Goubault
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Adel Djoudi .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom

    John Fitzgerald

  2. US Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, District of Columbia, USA

    Constance Heitmeyer

  3. ISTI-CNR, Pisa, Italy

    Stefania Gnesi

  4. University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus

    Anna Philippou

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Djoudi, A., Bardin, S., Goubault, É. (2016). Recovering High-Level Conditions from Binary Programs. In: Fitzgerald, J., Heitmeyer, C., Gnesi, S., Philippou, A. (eds) FM 2016: Formal Methods. FM 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9995. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48989-6_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48989-6_15

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-48988-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-48989-6

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