Publication detail

Preprocessing of Binary Executable Files Towards Retargetable Decompilation

KŘOUSTEK, J. KOLÁŘ, D.

Original Title

Preprocessing of Binary Executable Files Towards Retargetable Decompilation

Type

article in a collection out of WoS and Scopus

Language

English

Original Abstract

The goal of retargetable machine-code decompilation is to analyze and reversely translate platform-dependent executable files into a high level language (HLL) representation. This process can be used for many different purposes, such as legacy code reengineering, malware analysis, etc. Retargetable decompilation is a complex task that must deal with a lot of different platform-specific features and missing information. Moreover, input files are often compressed or protected from any kind of analysis (up to 80% of malware samples). Therefore, accurate preprocessing of input files is one of the necessary prerequisites in order to achieve the best results. This paper presents a concept of a generic preprocessing system that consists of a precise signature-based compiler and packer detector, plugin-based unpacker, and converter into an internal platform-independent file format. This approach has been adopted and tested in an existing retargetable decompiler. According to our experimental results, the proposed retargetable solution is fully competitive with existing platform-dependent tools.

Keywords

reverse engineering, decompilation, packer detection, unpacking, executable file, Lissom

Authors

KŘOUSTEK, J.; KOLÁŘ, D.

RIV year

2013

Released

21. 7. 2013

Publisher

International Academy, Research, and Industry Association

Location

Nice

ISBN

978-1-61208-283-7

Book

8th International Multi-Conference on Computing in the Global Information Technology (ICCGI'13)

Pages from

259

Pages to

264

Pages count

6

URL

http://www.thinkmind.org/index.php?view=article&articleid=iccgi_2013_13_10_10061

BibTex

@inproceedings{BUT103439,
  author="Jakub {Křoustek} and Dušan {Kolář}",
  title="Preprocessing of Binary Executable Files Towards Retargetable Decompilation",
  booktitle="8th International Multi-Conference on Computing in the Global Information Technology (ICCGI'13)",
  year="2013",
  pages="259--264",
  publisher="International Academy, Research, and Industry Association",
  address="Nice",
  isbn="978-1-61208-283-7",
  url="http://www.thinkmind.org/index.php?view=article&articleid=iccgi_2013_13_10_10061"
}