A. Sepp, B. Mihaila and A. Simon. Precise Static Analysis of Binaries by Extracting Relational Information. In  M.Pinzger and D. Poshyvanyk, editors, Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, Limerick, Ireland, October 2011. IEEE Computer Society.

While the reconstruction of the control-flow graph of a binary has received wide attention, the challenge of categorizing code into defect-free and possibly incorrect remains a challenge for current static analyses. We present the intermediate language RREIL and a corresponding analysis framework that is able to infer precise numeric information on variables without resorting to an expensive analysis at the bit-level. Specifically, we propose a hierarchy of three interfaces to abstract domains, namely for inferring memory layout, bit-level information and numeric information. Our framework can be easily enriched with new abstract domains at each level. We demonstrate the extensibility of our framework by detailing a novel acceleration technique (a so-called widening) as an abstract domain that helps to find precise fixpoints of loops.

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