Binary code analysis allows analyzing binary code without having access to the corresponding source code. A binary, after disassembly, is expressed in an assembly language. This inspires us to approach binary analysis by leveraging ideas and techniques from Natural Language Processing (NLP), a fruitful area focused on processing text of various natural languages. We notice that binary code analysis and NLP share many analogical topics, such as semantics extraction, classification, and code/text comparison. This work thus borrows ideas from NLP to address two important code similarity comparison problems. (I) Given a pair of basic blocks of different instruction set architectures (ISAs), determining whether their semantics is similar; and (II) given a piece of code of interest, determining if it is contained in another piece of code of a different ISA. The solutions to these two problems have many applications, such as cross-architecture vulnerability discovery and code plagiarism detection.Despite the evident importance of Problem I, existing solutions are either inefficient or imprecise. Inspired by Neural Machine Translation (NMT), which is a new approach that tackles text across natural languages very well, we regard instructions as words and basic blocks as sentences, and propose a novel cross-(assembly)-lingual deep learning approach to solving Problem I, attaining high efficiency and precision. Many solutions have been proposed to determine whether two pieces of code, e.g., functions, are equivalent (called the equivalence problem), which is different from Problem II (called the containment problem). Resolving the cross-architecture code containment problem is a new and more challenging endeavor. Employing our technique for crossarchitecture basic-block comparison, we propose the first solution to Problem II. We implement a prototype system INNEREYE and perform a comprehensive evaluation. A comparison between our approach and existing approaches to Problem I shows that our system outperforms them in terms of accuracy, efficiency and scalability. The case studies applying the system demonstrate that our solution to Problem II is effective. Moreover, this research showcases how to apply ideas and techniques from NLP to largescale binary code analysis.

Since its launch in late 2013, China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has achieved many tangible results that may have lasting effect on the social and economic development of host countries and on the geopolitical dynamics of the world. Its emergence in international political discourse is changing the basic thinking and logic of traditional geopolitical competition. While Western countries tend to interpret the BRI as part of China’s hidden geopolitical strategy to ultimately rule the world, Chinese and most developing nations see it as China’s international cooperation strategy to enhance global connectivity, communication and cooperation, so as to foster a more balanced and equitable world system. To maintain a favorable international environment for further progress of the BRI, China needs to better explain the details concerning the initiative as well as its role in the country’s grand strategy of peaceful development. Meanwhile, China must keep striving to match its words with its deeds in global arenas, so as to win more trust and support from the international community in jointly implementing the initiative.

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Facing increasing challenges to regional peace and stability, yet feeling isolated in several key security mechanisms in the Asia-Pacific, China has been taking active measures to improve its security environment and to foster a new regional security architecture based on the “New Asian Security Concept,” in order to achieve a lasting and commonly beneficial collective security order in the region. Though no official blueprint has been established by the Chinese government, one can expect China to push forward an all-inclusive and comprehensive platform as the core of the new architecture which features collective security driven by major powers based on their consulted consensus. Yet China will not seek to build a completely new Asia-Pacific security architecture to replace the old one. Instead, it is taking a pragmatic and incremental approach to shape the necessary environment for the evolution of the old architecture into a more inclusive and balanced one. If Sino-U.S. relations can be well managed and China continues to project its growing power in a refrained and contributive way to provide more public goods for regional peace and development, then it is hopeful that a new regional security architecture will take shape in the coming decades.