What You Trace is What You Get: Dynamic Stack-Layout Recovery for Binary Recompilation
Fabian Parzefall, Chinmay Deshpande, Felicitas Hetzelt, Michael Franz · 2024
Users of proprietary and/or legacy programs without vendor support are denied the significant advances in compiler technologies of the past decades. Adapting these technologies to operate directly on binaries without source code is often infeasible. Binary recompilers attempt to bridge this gap by "lifting" binary executables to compiler-level intermediate representations (IR) and "lowering" them back down to executable form, enabling application of the full range of analyses and transformations available in modern compiler infrastructures. Past approaches could not recover local variables in lifted programs with sufficient precision, which is a necessary prerequisite for many compiler-related applications, including performance optimization. They have relied on heuristics failing on certain input programs, or on conservative over-approximations yielding imprecise results.