Title
Augmenting Decompiler Output with Learned Variable Names and Types
Abstract
A common tool used by security professionals for reverse-engineering binaries found in the wild is the decompiler. A decompiler attempts to reverse compilation, transforming a binary to a higher-level language such as C. High-level languages ease reasoning about programs by providing useful abstractions such as loops, typed variables, and comments, but these abstractions are lost during compilation. Decompilers are able to deterministically reconstruct structural properties of code, but comments, variable names, and custom variable types are technically impossible to recover. In this paper we present DIRTY (DecompIled variable ReTYper), a novel technique for improving the quality of decompiler output that automatically generates meaningful variable names and types. DIRTY is built on a Transformer-based neural network model and is trained on code automatically scraped from repositories on GitHub. DIRTY uses this model to postprocesses decompiled files, recommending variable types and names given their context. Empirical evaluation on a novel dataset of C code mined from GitHub shows that DIRTY outperforms prior work approaches by a sizable margin, recovering the original names written by developers 66.4% of the time and the original types 75.8% of the time.
Year
Venue
DocType
2022
PROCEEDINGS OF THE 31ST USENIX SECURITY SYMPOSIUM
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Qibin Chen100.68
Jeremy Lacomis2102.55
Edward J. Schwartz353723.29
Claire Le Goues4176668.79
Graham Neubig500.34
Bogdan Vasilescu693548.75