Title :
Symbolic interpretation of legacy assembly language
Author :
Carette, Jacques ; Chowdhury, Pulak Kumar
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Comput. & Software, McMaster Univ., Hamilton, Ont., Canada
Abstract :
We apply static analysis and symbolic interpretation techniques to reverse engineer the semantics of legacy assembler code. We examine the case of IBM-1800 programs in detail. From the documented operational semantics of the IBM-1800, we simultaneously obtain an emulator and a symbolic analysis program. Augmented with some control flow information, we can use the symbolic analysis to provide both complete and generic semantics for some interesting code sequences.
Keywords :
assembly language; program diagnostics; programming language semantics; reverse engineering; software maintenance; IBM-1800 programs; code sequences; control flow information; documented operational semantics; emulator program; legacy assembler code; reverse engineering; static analysis; symbolic analysis program; symbolic interpretation; Assembly; Computer languages; Control system analysis; Control systems; Equations; High level languages; Information analysis; Power generation; Registers; Reverse engineering;
Conference_Titel :
Reverse Engineering, 12th Working Conference on
Print_ISBN :
0-7695-2474-5
DOI :
10.1109/WCRE.2005.31
