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LibIHT: A Hardware-Based Approach to Efficient and Evasion-Resistant Dynamic Binary Analysis
October 2025 • C. Zhao, Yohan Beugin, Jean-Charles Noirot Ferrand, Quinn Burke, Guancheng Li, Patrick McDaniel
Dynamic program analysis is invaluable for malware detection, debugging, and performance profiling. However, software-based instrumentation incurs high overhead and can be evaded by anti-analysis techniques. In this paper, we propose LibIHT, a hardware-assisted tracing framework that leverages on-CPU branch tracing features (Intel Last Branch Record and Branch Trace Store) to efficiently capture program control-flow with minimal performance impact. Our approach reconstructs control-flow graphs (CFGs) by collecting…