Laura Matzen, Michelle A Leger, Geoffrey Reedy (Sandia National Laboratories)

Binary reverse engineers combine automated and manual techniques to answer questions about software. However, when evaluating automated analysis results, they rarely have additional information to help them contextualize these results in the binary. We expect that humans could more readily understand the binary program and these analysis results if they had access to information usually kept internal to the analysis, like value-set analysis (VSA) information. However, these automated analyses often give up precision for scalability, and imprecise information might hinder human decision making.

To assess how precision of VSA information affects human analysts, we designed a human study in which reverse engineers answered short information flow problems, determining whether code snippets would print sensitive information. We hypothesized that precise VSA information would help our participants analyze code faster and more accurately, and that imprecise VSA information would lead to slower, less accurate performance than no VSA information. We presented hand-crafted code snippets with precise, imprecise, or no VSA information in a blocked design, recording participants’ eye movements, response times, and accuracy while they analyzed the snippets. Our data showed that precise VSA information changed participants’ problem-solving strategies and supported faster, more accurate analyses. However, surprisingly, imprecise VSA information also led to increased accuracy relative to no VSA information, likely due to the extra time participants spent working through the code.

View More Papers

Understanding Worldwide Private Information Collection on Android

Yun Shen (NortonLifeLock Research Group), Pierre-Antoine Vervier (NortonLifeLock Research Group), Gianluca Stringhini (Boston University)

Read More

PGFUZZ: Policy-Guided Fuzzing for Robotic Vehicles

Hyungsub Kim (Purdue University), Muslum Ozgur Ozmen (Purdue University), Antonio Bianchi (Purdue University), Z. Berkay Celik (Purdue University), Dongyan Xu (Purdue University)

Read More

Demo #4: Attacking Tesla Model X’s Autopilot Using Compromised...

Ben Nassi (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev), Yisroel Mirsky (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Georgia Tech), Dudi Nassi, Raz Ben Netanel (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev), Oleg Drokin (Independent Researcher), and Yuval Elovici (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev) Best Demo Award Winner ($300 cash prize)!

Read More

Short Paper: Declarative Demand-Driven Reverse Engineering

Yihao Sun, Jeffrey Ching, Kristopher Micinski (Department of Electical Engineering and Computer Science, Syracuse University)

Read More