Interprocedural static slicing of binary executables

Abstract

Although the slicing of programs written in a high-level language has been widely studied in the literature, very little work has been published on the slicing of binary executable programs. The lack of existing solutions is really hard to understand since the application domain for slicing binaries is similar to that for slicing high-level languages. We present a method for the interprocedural static slicing of binary executables. We applied our slicing method to real size binaries and achieved an interprocedural slice size of between 56%-68%. We used conservative approaches to handle unresolved function calls and branching instructions. Our current implementation contains an imprecise (but safe) memory dependence model as well. However, this conservative slicing method might still be useful in analysing large binary programs. We suggest some improvements to eliminate useless edges from dependence graphs as well.