McSema: A native code to LLVM IR translation framework

http://blog.trailofbits.com/2014/08/07/mcsema-is-officially-open-source/

by wyc • 12 years ago

85 12 12 years ago

blog.trailofbits.com

beernutz2• 12 years ago

Pardon my ignorance, (I don't mean to be dense here) but what the heck is this doing? It sounds like recompiling machine code into intermediate code. Is that a fair (if short and over simple) description?

frakturfreund• 12 years ago

Yes, it’s a Disassembler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disassembler

tptacek• 12 years ago

It's more than a disassembler. Disassemblers are easy to write. Stateful transformation is much harder.

SloopJon• 12 years ago

The announcement links to an earlier blog post (pardon my formatting):

http://blog.trailofbits.com/2014/06/23/a-preview-of-mcsema/

"McSema translates x86 machine code into LLVM bitcode.

"Why would we do such a crazy thing?

"Because we wanted to analyze existing binary applications, and reasoning about LLVM bitcode is much easier than reasoning about x86 instructions.

"Not only is it easier to reason about LLVM bitcode, but it is easier to manipulate and re-target bitcode to a different architecture."

beernutz2• 12 years ago

Thank you. I missed that post.

btown• 12 years ago

Coupled with emscripten, which compiles LLVM IR to asm.js, this could be huge. Questions of IP and legality aside for the moment, imagine being able to port everything from old games to VST audio plugins to the browser... without needing access to the source code!

Others have already had similar ideas: see https://lobste.rs/s/m39toj/a_preview_of_mcsema_a_framework_f...

Of course nothing other than trivial examples will work at this early stage... but we can only dream!

jacob019• 12 years ago

Would this allow one to recompile X86 binaries to another architecture?

0x09• 12 years ago

Other LLVM decompilation projects:

Dagger, http://dagger.repzret.org (x86)

Fracture, https://github.com/draperlaboratory/fracture (x86, ARM, PPC)

libbeauty, https://github.com/jcdutton/libbeauty (x86)

jevinskie• 12 years ago

I've actually used dagger to transform a very simple library into IR. I had trouble trying/was unable to do the same with the other two projects. Unfortunately when I contacted the dagger authors for some tips on how to fix some deficiencies that I found with a more complex binary, I received no response. =(

Granted, they are students and thus always busy

I can't wait to try out McSema. =)

greeq• 12 years ago

What's the performance overhead though? And size overhead? I'd imagine it'd be quite large.

toleavetheman• 12 years ago

I have been waiting for something like this to be solved by those more capable than myself. My dream is to combine this with ZeroVM for cloud execution and LLVM Polly for automatic parallelism (and other static analysis), and to have a runtime that seemingly magically takes a simple scientific app and runs it on a huge virtual machine in the cloud.

moyix• 12 years ago

The talk at REcon that introduced this tool is also excellent: http://recon.cx/2014/video/recon2014-10-artem-dinaburg-andre...

McSema: A native code to LLVM IR translation framework

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