No Source Code? No Problem

A new paper published in the Communications of the ACM, titled 'No Source Code? No Problem,' explores the possibility of reverse engineering software without access to the source code. Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the University of California, Berkeley, used a combination of machine learning and symbolic execution to decompile a Windows executable file. They used a technique called 'concolic execution,' which combines concrete and symbolic execution to identify input values that trigger specific code paths. Through this method, they were able to decompile a 64-bit Windows executable file with a size of approximately 4 MB, consisting of 10,000 functions. The researchers also tested their approach on a 32-bit Linux executable file and were able to decompile it successfully.