Binary analysis facilitates many important applications like malware detection and automatically fixing vulnerable software. In this paper, we propose to apply artificial neural networks to solve important yet difficult problems in binary analysis. Specifically, we tackle the problem of function identification, a crucial first step in many binary analysis techniques. Using a dataset from prior work, we show that recurrent neural networks can identify functions in binaries with greater accuracy and efficiency than the state-of-the-art machine-learning-based method. We can train the model an order of magnitude faster and evaluate it on binaries hundreds of times faster. Furthermore, it halves the error rate on six out of eight benchmarks, and performs comparably on the remaining two.
Title
Recognizing Functions in Binaries with Neural Networks
Published
2017-12-12
Full Collection Name
Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences Technical Reports
Other Identifiers
EECS-2017-200
Type
Text
Extent
19 p
Archive
The Engineering Library
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