Static Disassembly of Obfuscated Binaries

Disassembly is the process of recovering a symbolic representation of a program’s machine code instructions from its binary representation. Recently, a number of techniques have been proposed that attempt to foil the disassembly process. These techniques are very effective against state-of-the-art disassemblers, preventing a substantial fraction of a binary program from being disassembled correctly. This could allow an attacker to hide malicious code from static analysis tools that depend on correct disassembler output (such as virus scanners).

The paper presents novel binary analysis techniques that substantially improve the success of the disassembly process when confronted with obfuscated binaries. Based on control flow graph information and statistical methods, a large fraction of the program’s instructions can be correctly identified. An evaluation of the accuracy and the performance of our tool is provided, along with a comparison to several state-of-the-art disassemblers.