Binary rewriting without control flow recovery
Gregory J. Duck, Xiang Gao, Abhik Roychoudhury
Abstract
Static binary rewriting has many important applications in software security and systems, such as hardening, repair, patching, instrumentation, and debugging. While many different static binary rewriting tools have been proposed, most rely on recovering control flow information from the input binary. The recovery step is necessary since the rewriting process may move instructions, meaning that the set of jump targets in the rewritten binary needs to be adjusted accordingly. Since the static recovery of control flow information is a hard problem in general, most tools rely on a set of simplifying heuristics or assumptions, such as specific compilers, specific source languages, or binary file meta information. However, the reliance on assumptions or heuristics tends to scale poorly in practice, and most state-of-the-art static binary rewriting tools cannot handle very large/complex programs such as web browsers.