Software Code De-Compilation Techniques and Approaches: A Comparative Study

Abstract

De-compilation is the process of executable files as input where the de-compilation process tries to get away the source code, or the majority of it, if the file's source code is lost or damaged for whatever cause. De-compilation has many uses such as code recovery, security testing, and errors corrections, however, de-compilation is cautious since it depends on certain approaches and techniques. Nowadays de-compilation done by many automated and semi-automated tools, but the accuracy and the efficiency of it depend on the proposed approaches and techniques to stand in front of reengineering challenges. This paper aims to highlight up-to-date prior contributions in the field where 8 published research papers from May 2020 until May 2023 were collected to investigate the state-of-art. As a result, some of the researchers tend to develop their own tools and others tend to use popular automated with different approaches and techniques where the majority of the researchers focused on C, C++, and JAVA programming languages where 50% were de-compilation on C language.