Parameter and Return-value Analysis of Binary Executables

The recovery of parameter and return-value plays an important role in decompilation, reverse engineering, binary translation and software maintenance etc. Furthermore, related approaches are very useful to inter- procedural analyzing and slicing of binary executable. However, the operations on parameters and return- values always appear obscure after the optimizing phases of a compiler, which will make the recovery hard to realize. In this paper, we present a flow-insensitive but context-sensitive algorithm based on data dependence analysis to get back parameters and return- values. In addition, we discuss our experimental results obtained by applying our techniques to a static binary translation framework. Evidence shows that our method performs well in analyzing the parameters and return-values of executables. We use an IA-64 executable for demonstration, but our techniques are not limited to any particular architecture.