Decompilation is a widely used process for reverse engineers to significantly enhance code readability by lifting assembly code to a higher-level C-like language, pseudo-code. Nevertheless, the process of compilation and stripping irreversibly discards high-level semantic information that is crucial to code comprehension, such as comments, identifier names, and types. Existing approaches typically recover only one type of information, making them suboptimal for semantic inference. In this paper, we treat pseudo-code as a special programming language, then present a unified pre-trained model, HexT5, that is trained on vast amounts of natural language comments, source identifiers, and pseudo-code using novel pseudo-code-based pre-training objectives. We fine-tune HexT5 on various downstream tasks, including code summarization, variable name recovery, function name recovery, and similarity detection. Comprehensive experiments show that HexT5 achieves state-of-the-art performance on four downstream tasks, and it demonstrates the robust effectiveness and generalizability of HexT5 for binary-related tasks.

Building a model to reassign descriptive names for binary functions is considerable assistance for reverse engineering. Existing methods proposed for this issue are based on the low-level representation of binary code (e.g., assembly code), and especially the recent approaches employed neural-based models on instruction sequences. However, their performance is still unsatisfactory. Meanwhile, modern decompilers provide lifted representations of binary code, and their effectiveness has not been adequately studied. This paper further explores the issue of function name reassignment from the perspective of binary code representation. Specifically, we present a general and flexible NEural-based function name Reassignment framework NER, which leverages a decompiler to obtain a specific representation and applies the corresponding serialization strategy on it. NER then uses an alternative neural network to make predictions. Three levels of representation are investigated, including assembly code, Intermediate Representation (IR), and pseudo-code. We observe the binary code representations are significant for the final performance. It demonstrates that the pseudo-code is the most effective one. Based on these findings, we leverage the framework to implement a reassignment model NER-pc, which has 25% and 10% F1 score improvements against the state-of-the-art methods. Besides, more experiments are conducted to verify the design of NER and the effectiveness of NER-pc.

Software in the wild is usually released as stripped binaries that contain no debug information (e.g., function names). This paper studies the issue of reassigning descriptive names for functions to help facilitate reverse engineering. Since the essence of this issue is a data-driven prediction task, persuasive research should be based on sufficiently large-scale and diverse data. However, prior studies can only be based on small-scale datasets because their techniques suffer from heavyweight binary analysis, making them powerless in the face of big-size and large-scale binaries.