Software-Architecture Recovery from Machine Code

In this paper, we present a tool, called Lego, which recovers object-oriented software architecture from stripped binaries. Lego takes a stripped binary as input, and uses information obtained from dynamic analysis to (i) group the functions in the binary into classes, and (ii) identify inheritance and composition relationships between the inferred classes. The information obtained by Lego can be used for reengineering legacy software, and for understanding the architecture of software systems that lack documentation and source code. Our experiments show that the class hierarchies recovered by Lego have a high degree of agreement---measured in terms of precision and recall---with the hierarchy defined in the source code

Understanding the Architecture of Software Systems

The first activity performed by maintenance programmers when approaching the task of understanding a system is often trying to discover its high level structure, that is identifying its subsystems and their relations: in few words, the software architecture of the system. In this paper, an approach for the architectural analysis of software systems, together with an environment implementing the approach, are described. The approach is based on a hierarchical architectural model that drives the application of a set of architectural recognizers. Each recognizer builds an abstract view describing some architectural aspects of the system, or of some of its parts. The implementation of the environment supporting the architectural analysis process described is currently in progress. Keywords:program understanding, software architectures, reverse engineering, software visualization, user interface. 1 Introduction Understanding a software system may carry different meanings according to the ..