Thursday, September 29, 2005
4:15 pm
B17 Upson Hall

Computer Science
Colloquium
Fall 2005


Thomas Reps
University of Wisconsin-Madison

WYSINWYX: What You See is Not What You Execute


What You See Is Not What You eXecute: computers do not execute source-code programs; they execute machine-code programs that are generated from source code. Not only can the WYSINWYX phenomenon create a mismatch between what a programmer intends and what is actually executed by the processor, it can cause analyses that are performed on source code to fail to detect certain bugs and security vulnerabilities. This issue arises regardless of whether one's favorite approach to assuring that programs behave as desired is based on theorem proving, model checking, or abstract interpretation.

To address the WYSINWYX problem, we have developed a static-analysis algorithm to recover information from stripped executables about the memory-access operations that the program performs. This algorithm has been incorporated into CodeSurfer/x86, a prototype tool for browsing, inspecting, and analyzing stripped x86 executables.

Joint work with G. Balakrishnan (UW), J. Lim (UW), and T. Teitelbaum (Cornell and GrammaTech, Inc.).