Gadgets Splicing: Dynamic Binary Transformation for Precise Rewriting

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Linan Tian, Yangyang Shi, Liwei Chen, Yanqi Yang, Gang Shi

Published: 2022, Last Modified: 06 Nov 2025CGO 2022EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY-SA 4.0
Abstract: Many systems and applications depend on binary rewriting technology to analyze and retrofit software binaries when source code is not available, including binary instrumentation, profiling and security policy reinforcement. However, the investigations have found that many static binary rewriters still fail to accurately transform all legal instructions in binaries. Dynamic binary rewriters allow for accuracy, but coverage and rewriting efficiency are limited. Therefore, the existing binary rewriting technology cannot meet all the needs of binary rewriting. In this paper, we present GRIN, a novel binary rewriting tool that allows for high-precision instruction identification. In GRIN, we propose a gadget-based entry address analysis technique. It identifies the entry addresses of the basic blocks in the binary by gathering and executing the basic blocks related to the computation of the entry addresses of the basic blocks. By traversing from these entries as the new entries of the program, we guarantee the correctness of the identified instructions. We have implemented the prototype of GRIN and evaluated on the SPEC2006 and the whole set of GNU Coreutils. We demonstrate that the precision of GRIN is improved to 99.92% compared to current state-of the-art techniques.