Towards Industrial-Scale Software Binary Analysis

PhD Thesis Proposal Defence


Title: "Towards Industrial-Scale Software Binary Analysis"

by

Mr. Anshunkang ZHOU


Abstract:

Software binaries form the operational backbone of modern industrial 
systems, from critical infrastructure and medical devices to autonomous 
vehicles and IoT ecosystems. However, vulnerabilities in these binaries, 
such as memory corruption and logic errors, pose significant risks, 
including catastrophic safety failures and financial losses. Traditional 
methods for ensuring the safety of industrial software require access to 
source code and interference with the building process to obtain analyzable 
artifacts (e.g., intermediate representations). Those approaches are 
impractical and imprecise in industrial-scale environments due to the 
complexity of modern building systems and the widespread usage of 
third-party libraries.

This proposal introduces two key techniques for industrial-scale software 
binary analysis to overcome the above limitations. First, we propose a new 
binary lifter Plankton together with two new algorithms that can fill the 
gaps between the low- and high-level code to produce high-quality LLVM 
intermediate representations (IRs) from binaries with debug information, 
enabling non-intrusive full-fledged static analysis with minor precision 
loss. Second, we propose Arcturus, a new binary similarity analysis 
technique that can achieve high code coverage and high accuracy 
simultaneously by manipulating program execution under the guidance of code 
reachability. Our method has already demonstrated real-world impact by 
deploying to industrial environments and identifying critical 
vulnerabilities in widely used systems.


Date:                   Tuesday, 27 May 2025

Time:                   10:00am - 12:00noon

Venue:                  Room 2128A
                        Lift 19

Committee Members:      Prof. Charles Zhang (Supervisor)
                        Dr. Shuai Wang (Chairperson)
                        Dr. Dongdong She