Dr. David Brumley, Carnegie Mellon University - ForAllSecure

My 17 years of binary analysis has taught me one thing: “easy” things in compilation and program analysis are often the “hard” things in binary analysis. Want to analyze assembly? Write an IL (oh my)! Want to perform static analysis? Let’s implement this data-flow analysis from the dragon book (oh wait...). The experiments seem to be working out except this case, but that’s just an engineering issue (wait, there really is a fundamental science problem there...). Want to transition this tool to practice? I’ll just open source it (oh, maintaining is hard work). I could make a company out of that (uh, customers aren’t asking to solve the hard scientific problems, they just want it to work). I’ll share some hilariously naive mindsets I had, and share some dinosaur-sized research problems that can (mistakenly) look like just small bugs. Where do we go? What’s the next step in the evolution of binary analysis to truly be able to find and fix vulnerabilities in software we all use?

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Dinosaur Resurrection: PowerPC Binary Patching for Base Station Analysis

Uwe Muller, Eicke Hauck, Timm Welz, Jiska Classen, Matthias Hollick (Secure Mobile Networking Lab, TU Darmstadt)

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DRAGON: Predicting Decompiled Variable Data Types with Learned Confidence...

Caleb Stewart, Rhonda Gaede, Jeffrey Kulick (University of Alabama in Huntsville)

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Rethink Custom Transformers for Binary Analysis

Heng Yin, Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, Riverside

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Mnemocrypt

André Pacteau, Antonino Vitale, Davide Balzarotti, Simone Aonzo (EURECOM)

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