Neural Machine Translation Inspired Binary Code Similarity Comparison beyond Function Pairs

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 rich area focused on processing text of various natural languages. We notice that binary code analysis and NLP share a lot of analogical topics, such as semantics extraction, summarization, and classification. This work utilizes these ideas to address two important code similarity comparison problems. (I) Given a pair of basic blocks for different instruction set architectures (ISAs), determining whether their semantics is similar or not; and (II) given a piece of code of interest, determining if it is contained in another piece of assembly code for a different ISA. The solutions to these two problems have many applications, such as cross-architecture vulnerability discovery and code plagiarism detection. 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. And the case studies utilizing the system demonstrate that our solution to Problem II is effective. Moreover, this research showcases how to apply ideas and techniques from NLP to large-scale binary code analysis.Comment: Accepted by Network and Distributed Systems Security (NDSS) Symposium 201

Software Verification and Graph Similarity for Automated Evaluation of Students' Assignments

In this paper we promote introducing software verification and control flow graph similarity measurement in automated evaluation of students' programs. We present a new grading framework that merges results obtained by combination of these two approaches with results obtained by automated testing, leading to improved quality and precision of automated grading. These two approaches are also useful in providing a comprehensible feedback that can help students to improve the quality of their programs We also present our corresponding tools that are publicly available and open source. The tools are based on LLVM low-level intermediate code representation, so they could be applied to a number of programming languages. Experimental evaluation of the proposed grading framework is performed on a corpus of university students' programs written in programming language C. Results of the experiments show that automatically generated grades are highly correlated with manually determined grades suggesting that the presented tools can find real-world applications in studying and grading