Explore Effectiveness and Performance of Security Checks on Software Binaries
Alex Bardas
Drew Davidson
Esam El-Araby
Michael Vitevitch
Binary analysis is difficult, as most of semantic and syntactic information available at source-level gets lost during the compilation process. If the binary is stripped and/ or optimized, then it negatively affects the efficacy of binary analysis frameworks. Moreover, handwritten assembly, obfuscation, excessive indirect calls or jumps, etc. further degrade their accuracy. Thus, it is important to investigate and assess the challenges to improve the binary analysis. One way of doing that is by studying security techniques implemented at binary-level.
In this dissertation we propose to implement existing compiler-level techniques for binary executables and thereby evaluate how does the loss of information at binary-level affect the performance of existing compiler-level techniques in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness.