Binary Code Clone Detection across Architectures and Compiling Configurations

Abstract

Binary code clone detection (or similarity comparison) is a fundamental technique for many important applications, such as plagiarism detection, malware analysis, software vulnerability assessment and program comprehension. With the prevailing of smart and IoT (Internet of Things) devices, more and more programs are ported from traditional desktop platforms (e.g., IA-32) to ARM and MIPS architectures. It becomes imperative to detect cloned binary code across architectures. However, because of incomparable instruction sets of different architectures as well as alternative compiling configurations, it is difficult to conduct a binary code clone detection with traditional syntax- or structure-based methods.