Using Dynamic Information in the Interprocedural Static Slicing of Binary Executables

  • Authors:

  • Ákos Kiss;Judit Jász;Tibor Gyimóthy

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Software Engineering, University of Szeged, Hungary;Department of Software Engineering, University of Szeged, Hungary;Department of Software Engineering, University of Szeged, Hungary

  • Venue:
  • Software Quality Control
  • Year:
  • 2005

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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.