Abstract
The need for automated, scalable and machine speed analysis is significant with the ever-increasing quantity of code that requires security analysis. Recent advancements in technology demonstrate the possibility of automated analysis of binaries by raising/lifting/translating them to an intermediate representation. This paper describes the efforts towards developing utilities for raising MIPS binaries to an intermediate representation (IR) of LLVM. Using LLVM-IR, one can leverage the existing utilities built over LLVM for performing automated analysis of lifted code. The implemented utilities extend open-source tools McSema and Remill for MIPS ISA. The paper presents the methodology of raising the MIPS binaries as a systematically arranged step by step procedure. While presenting the procedure, the text highlights the challenges faced during each of these translation steps. The results from the two test suites demonstrate that the implemented static binary translation (SBT) utilities can produce the LLVM-IR that can be analysed or recompiled back to an executable form.
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Acknowledgements
We want to thank the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) Govt. of India for funding this research work. Any views, opinions, and findings made in this paper are only of the authors and do not reflect the opinions of MeitY.
We would like to acknowledge the developer community of McSema & Remill from TrailOfBits for providing insights on the working of these tools.
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Romana, S., Bandgar, A.D., Kumar, M., Patil, M.U., Lakshmi Eswari, P.R. (2021). Raising MIPS Binaries to LLVM IR. In: Tripathy, S., Shyamasundar, R.K., Ranjan, R. (eds) Information Systems Security. ICISS 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13146. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92571-0_6
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