arXiv (Cornell University)
Declarative Demand-Driven Reverse Engineering
January 2021 • Yihao Sun, Jeffrey Ching, Kristopher Micinski
Binary reverse engineering is a challenging task because it often necessitates reasoning using both domain-specific knowledge (e.g., understanding entrypoint idioms common to an ABI) and logical inference (e.g., reconstructing interprocedural control flow). To help perform these tasks, reverse engineers often use toolkits (such as IDA Pro or Ghidra) that allow them to interactively explicate properties of binaries. We argue that deductive databases serve as a natural abstraction for interfacing between visualizati…