Assembly to high-level language translation

Cifuentes, Cristina; Simon, Doug; Fraboulet, Antoine

doi:10.1109/icsm.1998.738514

Cited by 43 publications

(38 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…The next level is decompilation of assembly, see e.g. [11]. This shares many of the complications associated to the decompilation of binaries, since current hardware architectures are rather complex, but at least it is possible to separate code from data.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Decompilation of Java bytecode to Prolog by partial evaluation

Gómez-Zamalloa

Albert

Puebla

2009

Information and Software Technology

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Reasoning about Java bytecode (JBC) is complicated due to its unstructured control-flow, the use of three-address code combined with the use of an operand stack, etc. Therefore, many static analyzers and model checkers for JBC first convert the code into a higher-level representation. In contrast to traditional decompilation, such representation is often not Java source, but rather some intermediate language which is a good input for the subsequent phases of the tool. Interpretive decompilation consists in partially evaluating an interpreter for the compiled language (in this case JBC) written in a high-level language w.r.t. the code to be decompiled. There have been proofs-of-concept that interpretive decompilation is feasible, but there remain important open issues when it comes to decompile a real language such as JBC. This paper presents, to the best of our knowledge, the first modular scheme to enable interpretive decompilation of a realistic programming language to a high-level representation, namely of JBC to Prolog. We introduce two notions of optimality which together require that decompilation does not generate code more than once for each program point. We demonstrate the impact of our modular approach and optimality issues on a series of realistic benchmarks. Decompilation times and decompiled program sizes are linear with the size of the input bytecode program. This demonstrates empirically the scalability of modular decompilation of JBC by partial evaluation.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Decompilation of Java bytecode to Prolog by partial evaluation

Gómez-Zamalloa

Albert

Puebla

2009

Information and Software Technology

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“…Cifuentes et al [5] described methods of control and data flow analysis in translating assembly to a highlevel language. Kastner and Wilhelm [8] reported work on generating CFGs from assembly code.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Cifuentes et al [3,4,5] described methods for converting assembly or binary code from one processor's instruction set architecture (ISA) to another, as well as decompilation of software binaries to high-level languages. Kruegel et al [9] described a technique for decompilation of obfuscated binaries.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Generation of Control and Data Flow Graphs from Scheduled and Pipelined Assembly Code

Zaretsky

Mittal

Dick

et al. 2006

Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing

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Abstract. High-level synthesis tools generally convert abstract designs described in a high-level language into a control and data flow graph (CDFG), which is then optimized and mapped to hardware. However, there has been little work on generating CDFGs from highly pipelined software binaries, which complicate the problem of determining data flow propagation and dependencies. This paper presents a methodology for generating CDFGs from highly pipelined and scheduled assembly code that correctly represents the data dependencies and propagation of data through the program control flow. This process consists of three stages: generating a control flow graph, linearizing the assembly code, and generating the data flow graph. The proposed methodology was implemented in the FREEDOM compiler and tested on 8 highly pipelined software binaries. Results indicate that data dependencies were correctly identified in the designs, allowing the compiler to perform complex optimizations to reduce clock cycles.

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“…Decompilation. Past work on decompiling assembly code to a high-level language [9] is also peripherally related to our work. However, the decompilers reported in the literature are somewhat limited in what they are able to do when translating assembly code to high-level code.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, the decompilers reported in the literature are somewhat limited in what they are able to do when translating assembly code to high-level code. For instance, Cifuentes's work [9] primarily concentrates on recovery of (a) expressions from instruction sequences, and (b) control flow. We believe that decompilers would benefit from the memory-access-analysis method described in this paper, which can be performed prior to decompilation proper, to recover information about numeric values, address values, physical types, and definite links from objects to virtual-function tables [5].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

DIVINE: DIscovering Variables IN Executables

Balakrishnan¹,

Reps²

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Abstract. This paper addresses the problem of recovering variable-like entities when analyzing executables in the absence of debugging information. We show that variable-like entities can be recovered by iterating Value-Set Analysis (VSA), a combined numeric-analysis and pointer-analysis algorithm, and Aggregate Structure Identification, an algorithm to identify the structure of aggregates. Our initial experiments show that the technique is successful in correctly identifying 88% of the local variables and 89% of the fields of heap-allocated objects. Previous techniques recovered 83% of the local variables, but 0% of the fields of heap-allocated objects. Moreover, the values computed by VSA using the variables recovered by our algorithm would allow any subsequent analysis to do a better job of interpreting instructions that use indirect addressing to access arrays and heap-allocated data objects: indirect operands can be resolved better at 4% to 39% of the sites of writes and up to 8% of the sites of reads. (These are the memory-access operations for which it is the most difficult for an analyzer to obtain useful results.)

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Assembly to high-level language translation

Cited by 43 publications

References 7 publications

Decompilation of Java bytecode to Prolog by partial evaluation

Decompilation of Java bytecode to Prolog by partial evaluation

Generation of Control and Data Flow Graphs from Scheduled and Pipelined Assembly Code

DIVINE: DIscovering Variables IN Executables

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