Parallel binary code analysis

Abstract

Binary code analysis is widely used to help assess a program's correctness, performance, and provenance. Binary analysis applications often construct control flow graphs, analyze data flow, and use debugging information to understand how machine code relates to source lines, inlined functions, and data types. To date, binary analysis has been single-threaded, which is too slow for convenient use in performance tuning workflows where it is used to help attribute performance to complex applications with large binaries. This paper describes our design and implementation for accelerating the task of constructing control flow graphs (CFGs) from binaries by using multithreading. Prior research focuses on algorithms for analysis of challenging code constructs encountered while constructing CFGs, including functions sharing code, jump tables, non-returning functions, and tail calls. These algorithms are described from a program analysis perspective and are not suitable for direct parallel implementation. We abstract the task of constructing CFGs as repeated applications of several core CFG operations that include creating functions, basic blocks, and edges. We then derive CFG operation dependency, commutativity, and monotonicity. These operation properties guide our design of a new parallel analysis for constructing CFGs. Using 64 threads, we achieved as much as 25× speedup for constructing CFGs and 8× for a performance analysis tool that leverages our new analysis to recover program structure.