Zipr: A High-Impact, Robust, Open-source, Multi-platform, Static Binary Rewriter

Zipr is a tool for static binary rewriting, first published in 2016. Zipr was engineered to support arbitrary program modification with an emphasis on low overhead, robustness, and flexibility to perform security enhancements and instrumentation. Originally targeted to Linux x86-32 binaries, Zipr now supports 32- and 64-bit binaries for X86, ARM, and MIPS architectures, as well as preliminary support for Windows programs. These features have helped Zipr make a dramatic impact on research. It was first used in the DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge to take second place overall, with the best security score of any participant, Zipr has now been used in a variety of research areas by both the original authors as well as third parties. Zipr has also led to publications in artificial diversity, program instrumentation, program repair, fuzzing, autonomous vehicle security, research computing security, as well as directly contributing to two student dissertations. The open-source repository has accepted accepted patches from several external authors, demonstrating the impact of Zipr beyond the original authors.Comment: 5 page