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.

A method for compiler testing using symbolic interpretation is presented. This method is a cross between program proving and program testing. It is useful in demonstrating that programs are correctly translated from a hzgh level language to a low level language thereby improving the reliability of the compiler. The term symbolic interpretation is used to describe the process of obtaining an intermediate form of the low level language program that is suitable for further processing by a proof system. Symbolic interpretation is the heart of the system and enables the recordlng of a transcript of all computations in the program. This process interprets a set of procedures which describe the effects of machine language instructions corresponding to the target machine on a suitable computation model. The highlights and limitations of the process as well as future work are discussed in a framework of a specific LISP implementation on a PDP-IO computer.

advanced architectural features, such as explicit instruction-level parallelism, instruction predication, and speculative loads from memory. However, compiler optimizations that take advantage of these features can profoundly restructure the program’s code, making it potentially difficult to reconstruct the original program logic from an optimized Itanium executable. This paper describes techniques to undo some of the effects of such optimizations and thereby improve the quality of reverse engineering such executables.