A proposed methodology for decompilation of binary programs is presented, along with a description of a particular implementation of this methodology, dcc. dcc is a decompiler for the Intel 80x86 architecture, which takes as input a binary program from a DOS environment and produces C programs as output. The decompiler has been divided into three separate modules which resemble the structure of the compiler. The front-end module is machine dependent and performs the loading and parsing of the program, as well as the generation of an intermediate representation. The universal decompiling machine module is machine and language independent, and performs all the flow analysis of the program. Finally, the back-end module is language dependent and deals with the details of the target high level language. Even though the problem of decompilation is insoluble in general, a partial solution can be found, which gives information about the binary program. This paper describes some of the results ...

Recent high-level synthesis approaches and C-based hardware description languages attempt to improve the hardware design process by allowing developers to capture desired hardware functionality in a well-known high-level source language. However, these approaches have yet to achieve wide commercial success due in part to the difficulty of incorporating such approaches into software tool flows. The requirement of using a specific language, compiler, or development environment may cause many software developers to resist such approaches due to the difficulty and possible instability of changing well-established robust tool flows. Thus, in the past several years, synthesis from binaries has been introduced, both in research and in commercial tools, as a means of better integrating with tool flows by supporting all high-level languages and software compilers. Binary synthesis can be more easily integrated into a software development tool-flow by only requiring an additional backend tool, and it even enables completely transparent dynamic translation of executing binaries to configurable hardware circuits. In this article, we survey the key technologies underlying the important emerging field of binary synthesis. We compare binary synthesis to several related areas of research, and we then describe the key technologies required for effective binary synthesis: decompilation techniques necessary for binary synthesis to achieve results competitive with source-level synthesis, hardware/software partitioning methods necessary to find critical binary regions suitable for synthesis, synthesis methods for converting regions to custom circuits, and binary update methods that enable replacement of critical binary regions by circuits.

Reverse engineering of software systems has traditionally centered upon the generation of high-level abstractions or specifications from high-level code or databases. In this paper we report on a reverse engineering environment for low-level executable code: a reverse compilation or decompilation environment that aids in the understanding of the underlying executable program. The reverse compilation process recovers high-level code from executable programs at a higher representation level than that produced by disassemblers; in fact, disassembly is part of the first stage in this process. Several tools aid in the process of reverse compilation, these are: loaders, signature generators, library prototype generators, disassemblers, library bindings, and language to language translators. The integration of these tools in the whole process is presented in this paper. The results obtained by the prototype reverse compilation system dcc are encouraging: high-level code is regenerated with c...