The Convergence of Source Code and Binary Vulnerability Discovery -- A Case Study

Abstract

Decompilers are tools designed to recover a high-level language representation (typically in C code) from program binaries. Over the past five years, decompilers have improved enormously, not only in terms of the readability of the produced pseudocode, but also in terms of similarity of the recovered representation to the original source code. Albeit decompilers are routinely used by reverse engineers in different disciplines (e.g., to support vulnerability discovery or malware analysis), they are not yet adopted to produce input for source-code static analysis tools. In particular, source code vulnerability discovery and binary vulnerability discovery remain today two very different areas of research, despite the fact that decompilers could potentially bridge this gap and enable source-code analysis on binary files.