Cross-Architecture Binary Semantics Understanding via Similar Code Comparison

Abstract

With the prevailing of smart devices (e.g., smart phone, routers, cameras), more and more programs are ported from traditional desktop platform to embedded hardware with ARM or MIPS architecture. While the compiled binary code differs significantly due to the variety of CPU architectures, these ported programs share the same code base of the desktop version. Thus it is feasible to utilize the program of commodity computer to help understand those cross-compiled binaries and locate functions with similar semantics. However, as instruction sets of different architectures are generally incomparable, it is difficult to conduct a static cross-architecture binary code similarity comparison.