research-article

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WYSINWYX: What you see is not what you eXecute

Authors:

Gogul Balakrishnan,

Thomas RepsAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), Volume 32, Issue 6

Article No.: 23, Pages 1 - 84

https://doi.org/10.1145/1749608.1749612

Published: 13 August 2010 Publication History

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Abstract

Over the last seven years, we have developed static-analysis methods to recover a good approximation to the variables and dynamically allocated memory objects of a stripped executable, and to track the flow of values through them. The article presents the algorithms that we developed, explains how they are used to recover Intermediate Representations (IRs) from executables that are similar to the IRs that would be available if one started from source code, and describes their application in the context of program understanding and automated bug hunting.

Unlike algorithms for analyzing executables that existed prior to our work, the ones presented in this article provide useful information about memory accesses, even in the absence of debugging information. The ideas described in the article are incorporated in a tool for analyzing Intel x86 executables, called CodeSurfer/x86. CodeSurfer/x86 builds a system dependence graph for the program, and provides a GUI for exploring the graph by (i) navigating its edges, and (ii) invoking operations, such as forward slicing, backward slicing, and chopping, to discover how parts of the program can impact other parts.

To assess the usefulness of the IRs recovered by CodeSurfer/x86 in the context of automated bug hunting, we built a tool on top of CodeSurfer/x86, called Device-Driver Analyzer for x86 (DDA/x86), which analyzes device-driver executables for bugs. Without the benefit of either source code or symbol-table/debugging information, DDA/x86 was able to find known bugs (that had been discovered previously by source-code analysis tools), along with useful error traces, while having a low false-positive rate. DDA/x86 is the first known application of program analysis/verification techniques to industrial executables.

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Reviewer: Ramesh S

Source code analysis is a very well-known and well-developed area that deals with analyzing programs written in high-level languages to detect the presence of defects and to extract useful information about the program. Balakrishnan and Reps discuss the limitations of source code analysis when it comes to looking for various security vulnerabilities that often occur or are revealed only at the machine code level; also, the source code is not always available for analysis, especially for third-party-developed software. These considerations have motivated the authors to look at the static analysis of machine code with little additional information. Machine-level static analysis is very challenging, and involves extracting simple information such as the variables used by the program, and the control flow and data flow dependency, which deals with memory addresses. The analysis engine has to identify the correct chunks of address spaces as variables and perform the analysis. The large body of work in this area carried out by Reps and some of his students over the last several years is presented in this paper. As a result, it is voluminous and rich in content. It should be very useful to researchers interested in static analysis as applied to machine code. A number of algorithms described in the paper include the extraction of intermediate representation (IR) of the code, which is very similar to what is obtained from a high-level language. Value-set analysis is an important and novel technique proposed by the authors that would be very useful in performing machine code analysis. The paper is very extensive and describes the various algorithms used for the analysis clearly. It is very well written and can serve as an important resource for people interested in the static analysis of machine code. It contains a few examples and some details of the implementation of algorithms that have been used in the extension of their tool, CodeSurfer, for executables. Online Computing Reviews Service

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cover image ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems

ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems Volume 32, Issue 6

August 2010

215 pages

ISSN:0164-0925

EISSN:1558-4593

DOI:10.1145/1749608

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Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 13 August 2010

Accepted: 01 December 2009

Revised: 01 September 2009

Received: 01 February 2009

Published in TOPLAS Volume 32, Issue 6

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