String analysis for x86 binaries

  • Authors:
  • Mihai Christodorescu;Nicholas Kidd;Wen-Han Goh

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI;University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI;University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI

  • Venue:
  • PASTE '05 Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGSOFT workshop on Program analysis for software tools and engineering
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Information about string values at key points in a program can help program understanding, reverse engineering, and forensics. We present a static-analysis technique for recovering possible string values in an executable program, when no debug information or source code is available. The result of our analysis is a regular language that describes a superset of the string values possible at a given program point. We also impart some of the lessons learned in the process of implementing our analysis as a tool for recovering C-style strings in x86 executables.