Reverse engineering of legacy code exposed

Weide, Bruce W.; Heym, Wayne D.; Hollingsworth, Joseph E.

doi:10.1145/225014.225045

Cited by 19 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Reasoning problems arise when traditional assignment is used to copy references/pointers as so-called "shallow copies". Other papers (e.g., [Harms and Weide 1991], [Hogg et al 1992], [Weide et al 1995]) have already examined the many problems this causes. Indeed, the traditional assignment operator is the only data movement approach where support for modular reasoning is an issue, because it alone introduces aliased references on its own.…”

Section: Analysis Results and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Traditional assignment considered harmful

Pike

Heym

Adcock

et al. 2009

Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGPLAN Conference Companion on Object Oriented Programming Systems Languages and Applications

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Data movement in nearly all modern imperative languages is based on a single primitive: traditional assignment. (With traditional assignment, data are moved between variables by copying.) Unfortunately, traditional assignment poses many known software engineering drawbacks with respect to efficiency for value types, and with respect to modular reasoning for reference types. Moreover, its entrenched legacy has stifled serious regard of potentially superior data-movement primitives. Exploration of the complete design space for data-movement primitives supports the following conclusions: (1) traditional assignment is fundamentally flawed, and (2) any other data-movement primitive would be better.

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Section: Analysis Results and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Any scalable engineering discipline must be able to verify component properties in isolation without having them "break" when the component is subject to composition. We consider less complication to be better because this foundation is required for any scalable software engineering discipline [Weide et al 1995]. …”

Section: Ref-to-b)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Traditional assignment considered harmful

Pike

Heym

Adcock

et al. 2009

Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGPLAN Conference Companion on Object Oriented Programming Systems Languages and Applications

Self Cite

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“…Post-link optimizers, such as FDPR [4] by IBM or ALTO [5], are used to disassemble a compiled binary executable and recompile it into a more optimized form in order to produce a faster executable. Other works target decompilation of obfuscated binaries [6,7].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Combining static and dynamic array detection for binary synthesis with multiple memory ports

Rotem

Asher

2010

Des Autom Embed Syst

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In High-Level Synthesis, Binary Synthesis is a method for synthesizing compiled applications for which the source code is not available. One of the advantages of FPGAs over processors is the availability of multiple internal and external memory banks. Binary synthesis tools use multiple memory banks if they are able to recover data-structures from the binary. In this work we improve the recovery of data-structures by introducing dynamic memory analysis and combining it with improved static memory analysis. We show that many applications can only be synthesized using dynamic memory analysis. We present two FPGA based architectures for implementing the bound-checking and recovery for the synthesized code. Our experiments show that the proposed technique accelerates the execution of applications which use multiple memory banks concurrently. We demonstrate that many binary applications indeed benefit from this technique.

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“…3) This approach supports modular (i.e., component-wise) reasoning [18,21,24] about system behavior, since all pointers are hidden "under the hood" and there is no aliasing in any of the software we wrote except that which is carefully controlled inside this component's implementation [3,19].…”

Section: Dynamically Linked Structures Are Layeredmentioning

confidence: 99%

Experience report

Hollingsworth

Blankenship

Weide

2000

SIGSOFT Softw. Eng. Notes

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Academic research sometimes suffers from the "ivory tower" problem: ideas that sound good in theory do not necessarily work well in practice. An example of research that potentially could impact practice over the next few years is a novel set of component-based software engineering design principles, known as the RESOLVE discipline. This discipline has been taught to students for several years [23], and previous papers (e.g., [24]) have reported on student-sized software projects constructed using it. Here, we report on a substantial commercial product family that was engineered using the same principles --an application that we designed, built, and continue to maintain for profit, not as part of a research project. We discuss the impact of adhering to a very prescriptive set of design principles and explain our experience with the resulting applications. Lessons learned should benefit others who might be considering adopting such a componentbased software engineering discipline in the future.

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Reverse engineering of legacy code exposed

Cited by 19 publications

References 12 publications

Traditional assignment considered harmful

Traditional assignment considered harmful

Combining static and dynamic array detection for binary synthesis with multiple memory ports

Experience report

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