An empirical study on ARM disassembly tools
Muhui Jiang, Yajin Zhou, Xiapu Luo, Ruoyu Wang, Yang Liu, Kui Ren · 2020
With the increasing popularity of embedded devices, ARM is becoming the dominant architecture for them. In the meanwhile, there is a pressing need to perform security assessments for these devices. Due to different types of peripherals, it is challenging to dynamically run the firmware of these devices in an emulated environment. Therefore, the static analysis is still commonly used. Existing work usually leverages off-the-shelf tools to disassemble stripped ARM binaries and (implicitly) assume that reliable disassembling binaries and function recognition are solved problems. However, whether this assumption really holds is unknown.