Datalog Disassembly

Originally published on usenix.com.

29th USENIX Security Symposium, USENIX Security 2020, August 12-14, 2020 (distinguished paper)

Authors: 
Antonio Flores-Montoya and Eric Schulte, GrammaTech Inc.

Abstract: 
Disassembly is fundamental to binary analysis and rewriting. We present a novel disassembly technique that takes a stripped binary and produces reassembleable assembly code. The resulting assembly code has accurate symbolic information, providing cross-references for analysis and to enable adjustment of code and data pointers to accommodate rewriting. Our technique features multiple static analyses and heuristics in a combined Datalog implementation. We argue that Datalog’s inference process is particularly well suited for disassembly and the required analyses. Our implementation and experiments support this claim. We have implemented our approach into an open-source tool called Ddisasm. In extensive experiments in which we rewrite thousands of x64 binaries we find Ddisasm is both faster and more accurate than the current state-of-the-art binary reassembling tool, Ramblr.

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BibTeX

Flores-Montoya PDF

Flores-Montoya Paper (Prepublication) PDF

View the slides

Flores-Montoya PDF

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