GPU-disasm: A GPU-based x86 disassembler

Evangelos Ladakis, Giorgos Vasiliadis, Michalis Polychronakis, Sotiris Ioannidis, Georgios Portokalidis

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

Static binary code analysis and reverse engineering are crucial operations for malware analysis, binary-level software protections, debugging, and patching, among many other tasks. Faster binary code analysis tools are necessary for tasks such as analyzing the multitude of new malware samples gathered every day. Binary code disassembly is a core functionality of such tools which has not received enough attention from a performance perspective. In this paper we introduce GPUDisasm, a GPU-based disassembly framework for x86 code that takes advantage of graphics processors to achieve efficient large-scale analysis of binary executables. We describe in detail various optimizations and design decisions for achieving both inter-parallelism, to disassemble multiple binaries in parallel, as well as intra-parallelism, to decode multiple instructions of the same binary in parallel. The results of our experimental evaluation in terms of performance and power consumption demonstrate that GPU-Disasm is twice as fast than a CPU disassembler for linear disassembly and 4.4 times faster for exhaustive disassembly, with power consumption comparable to CPU-only implementations.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationInformation Security - 18th International Conference, ISC 2015, Proceedings
EditorsJavier Lopez, Chris J. Mitchell
Pages472-489
Number of pages18
DOIs
StatePublished - 2015
Event18th International Conference on Information Security, ISC 2015 - Trondheim, Norway
Duration: 9 Sep 201511 Sep 2015

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume9290
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference18th International Conference on Information Security, ISC 2015
Country/TerritoryNorway
CityTrondheim
Period9/09/1511/09/15

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