Rendezvous: A search engine for binary code

The problem of matching between binaries is important for software copyright enforcement as well as for identifying disclosed vulnerabilities in software. We present a search engine prototype called Rendezvous which enables indexing and searching for code in binary form. Rendezvous identifies binary code using a statistical model comprising instruction mnemonics, control flow sub-graphs and data constants which are simple to extract from a disassembly, yet normalising with respect to different compilers and optimisations. Experiments show that Rendezvous achieves F₂ measures of 86.7% and 83.0% on the GNU C library compiled with different compiler optimisations and the GNU coreutils suite compiled with gcc and clang respectively. These two code bases together comprise more than one million lines of code. Rendezvous will bring significant changes to the way patch management and copyright enforcement is currently performed.