Steffen Enders, Eva-Maria C. Behner, Niklas Bergmann, Mariia Rybalka, Elmar Padilla (Fraunhofer FKIE, Germany), Er Xue Hui, Henry Low, Nicholas Sim (DSO National Laboratories, Singapore)

Analyzing third-party software such as malware is a crucial task for security analysts. Although various approaches for automatic analysis exist and are the subject of ongoing research, analysts often have to resort to manual static analysis to get a deep understanding of a given binary sample. Since the source code of provided samples is rarely available, analysts regularly employ decompilers for easier and faster comprehension than analyzing a binary’s disassembly.

In this paper, we introduce our decompilation approach dewolf. We describe a variety of improvements over the previous academic state-of-the-art decompiler and some novel algorithms to enhance readability and comprehension, focusing on manual analysis. To evaluate our approach and to obtain a better insight into the analysts’ needs, we conducted three user surveys. The results indicate that dewolf is suitable for malware comprehension and that its output quality noticeably exceeds Ghidra and Hex-Rays in certain aspects. Furthermore, our results imply that decompilers aiming at manual analysis should be highly configurable to respect individual user preferences. Additionally, future decompilers should not necessarily follow the unwritten rule to stick to the code-structure dictated by the assembly in order to produce readable output. In fact, the few cases where dewolf already cracks this rule leads to its results considerably exceeding other decompilers. We publish a prototype implementation of dewolf and all survey results [1], [2].

View More Papers

Enhancing Symbolic Execution by Machine Learning Based Solver Selection

Sheng-Han Wen (National Taiwan University), Wei-Loon Mow (National Taiwan University), Wei-Ning Chen (National Taiwan University), Chien-Yuan Wang (National Taiwan University), Hsu-Chun Hsiao (National Taiwan University)

Read More

Bridging the Privacy Gap: Enhanced User Consent Mechanisms on...

Carl Magnus Bruhner (Linkoping University), David Hasselquist (Linkoping University, Sectra Communications), Niklas Carlsson (Linkoping University)

Read More

RCABench: Open Benchmarking Platform for Root Cause Analysis

Keisuke Nishimura, Yuichi Sugiyama, Yuki Koike, Masaya Motoda, Tomoya Kitagawa, Toshiki Takatera, Yuma Kurogome (Ricerca Security, Inc.)

Read More