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Using Dynamic Information in the Interprocedural Static Slicing of Binary Executables

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Abstract

Although the slicing of programs written in a high-level language has been widely studied in the literature, relatively few papers have been published on the slicing of binary executable programs. The lack of existing solutions for the latter is really hard to understand since the application domain for slicing binaries is similar to that for slicing high-level languages. Furthermore, there are special applications of the slicing of programs without source code like source code recovery, code transformation and the detection of security critical code fragments. In this paper, in addition to describing the method of interprocedural static slicing of binaries, we discuss how the set of the possible targets of indirect call sites can be reduced by dynamically gathered information. Our evaluation of the slicing method shows that, if indirect function calls are extensively used, both the number of edges in the call graph and the size of the slices can be significantly reduced.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Software Engineering, University of Szeged, Hungary

    Ákos Kiss, Judit Jász & Tibor Gyimóthy

Authors
  1. Ákos Kiss
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  2. Judit Jász
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  3. Tibor Gyimóthy
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Correspondence to Ákos Kiss.

Additional information

Ákos Kiss obtained his M.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Szeged in 2000. He is currently working on his Ph.D. thesis and his chosen field of research is the analysis and optimization of binary executables. He was the chief programmer of a code compaction project which sought to reduce ARM binaries. He is also interested in GCC and in open source development

Judit Jász obtained her M.Sc. in Computer Science recently from the University of Szeged and is currently a Ph.D student. Her main research interest is adapting slicing methods—originally intended for high-level languages—to binary executables. She is also actively working on improving the GCC compiler.

Tibor Gyimóthy is the head of the Software Engineering Department at the University of Szeged in Hungary. His research interests include program comprehension, slicing, reverse engineering and compiler optimization. He has published over 60 papers in these areas and was the leader of several software engineering R&D projects. He is the Program Co-Chair of the 21th International Conference on Software Maintenance, which will be held in Budapest, Hungary in 2005.

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Kiss, Á., Jász, J. & Gyimóthy, T. Using Dynamic Information in the Interprocedural Static Slicing of Binary Executables. Software Qual J 13, 227–245 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-005-1751-x

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