Binary lifting and recompilation allow a wide range of installtime program transformations, such as security hardening, deobfuscation, and reoptimization. Existing binary lifting tools are based on static disassembly and thus have to rely on heuristics to disassemble binaries.In this paper, we present BinRec, a new approach to heuristic-free binary recompilation which lifts dynamic traces of a binary to a compiler-level intermediate representation (IR) and lowers the IR back to a "recovered" binary. This enables BinRec to apply rich program transformations, such as compiler-based optimization passes, on top of the recovered representation. We identify and address a number of challenges in binary lifting, including unique challenges posed by our dynamic approach. In contrast to existing frameworks, our dynamic frontend can accurately disassemble and lift binaries without heuristics, and we can successfully recover obfuscated code and all SPEC INT 2006 benchmarks including C++ applications. We evaluate BinRec in three application domains: i) binary reoptimization, ii) deobfuscation (by recovering partial program semantics

Compile-time specialization and feature pruning through static binary rewriting have been proposed repeatedly as techniques for reducing the attack surface of large programs, and for minimizing the trusted computing base. We propose a new approach to attack surface reduction: dynamic binary lifting and recompilation.We present BinRec, a binary recompilation framework that lifts binaries to a compiler-level intermediate representation (IR) to allow complex transformations on the captured code. After transformation, BinRec lowers the IR back to a "recovered" binary, which is semantically equivalent to the input binary, but has its unnecessary features removed. Unlike existing approaches, which are mostly based on static analysis and rewriting, our framework analyzes and lifts binaries dynamically. The crucial advantage is that we can not only observe the full program including all of its dependencies, but we can also determine which program features the end-user actually uses. We evaluate the correctness and performance of Bin-Rec, and show that our approach enables aggressive pruning of unwanted features in COTS binaries. CCS CONCEPTS• Security and privacy → Software and application security; Software reverse engineering;