Section: New Results

Formal Verification of Static Analysis

Participants : Sandrine Blazy, Vincent Laporte, David Pichardie.

Static analysis of binary code is challenging for several reasons. In particular, standard static analysis techniques operate over control flow graphs, which are not available when dealing with self-modifying programs which can modify their own code at runtime. We formalized in the Coq proof assistant some key abstract interpretation techniques that automatically extract memory safety properties and control flow graphs from binary code [22] , and operate over a small subset of the x86 assembly. Our analyzer is formally proved correct and has been run on several self-modifying challenges, provided by Cai et al. in their PLDI 2007 paper.