Laura Matzen, Michelle A Leger, Geoffrey Reedy (Sandia National Laboratories)

Binary reverse engineers combine automated and manual techniques to answer questions about software. However, when evaluating automated analysis results, they rarely have additional information to help them contextualize these results in the binary. We expect that humans could more readily understand the binary program and these analysis results if they had access to information usually kept internal to the analysis, like value-set analysis (VSA) information. However, these automated analyses often give up precision for scalability, and imprecise information might hinder human decision making.

To assess how precision of VSA information affects human analysts, we designed a human study in which reverse engineers answered short information flow problems, determining whether code snippets would print sensitive information. We hypothesized that precise VSA information would help our participants analyze code faster and more accurately, and that imprecise VSA information would lead to slower, less accurate performance than no VSA information. We presented hand-crafted code snippets with precise, imprecise, or no VSA information in a blocked design, recording participants’ eye movements, response times, and accuracy while they analyzed the snippets. Our data showed that precise VSA information changed participants’ problem-solving strategies and supported faster, more accurate analyses. However, surprisingly, imprecise VSA information also led to increased accuracy relative to no VSA information, likely due to the extra time participants spent working through the code.

View More Papers

CBAT: A Comparative Binary Analysis Tool

Chloe Fortuna (STR), Chris Casinghino (Jane Street), Sam Lasser (Draper), JT Paasch (STR), Cody Roux (AWS), Philip Zucker (Draper)

Read More

RandRunner: Distributed Randomness from Trapdoor VDFs with Strong Uniqueness

Philipp Schindler (SBA Research), Aljosha Judmayer (SBA Research), Markus Hittmeir (SBA Research), Nicholas Stifter (SBA Research, TU Wien), Edgar Weippl (Universität Wien)

Read More

FirmDiff: Improving the Configuration of Linux Kernels Geared Towards...

Ioannis Angelakopoulos (Boston University), Gianluca Stringhini (Boston University), Manuel Egele (Boston University)

Read More

Bitcontracts: Supporting Smart Contracts in Legacy Blockchains

Karl Wüst (ETH Zurich), Loris Diana (ETH Zurich), Kari Kostiainen (ETH Zurich), Ghassan Karame (NEC Labs), Sinisa Matetic (ETH Zurich), Srdjan Capkun (ETH Zurich)

Read More