BinRec: Dynamic Binary Lifting and Recompilation

Overview

BinRec dynamically lifts binary executables to LLVM IR, where they can be optimized, hardened, or transformed and recompiled back to binaries. It is based on S2E. For a full description of the framework, see the original research paper.

Key Dependencies and Environment

Binrec has been developed for and tested against the following environments and major dependencies:

• Ubuntu 20.04.03 or Debian 11.3
• LLVM (Clang): 14
• Python 3.9
• s2e-env @4bd6a45

The limiting factor for both Linux environment and LLVM is s2e, which supports Ubuntu 20.04 LTS at a maximum.

Installing BinRec

1. BinRec uses just to automate various tasks including building BinRec. The first step in building BinRec is to install this tool (and curl if not already installed). We provide a simple shell script for this:

   ./get_just.sh

2. Next, BinRec and its dependencies can be fetched, built, and installed from the root of this repository with:

   just install-binrec

3. (Optional) The above command will download a prebuilt QEMU virtual machine image within which target binaries will run. The default prebuilt image is a Linux x86 image (currently the only supported environment). If you want to download additional images (e.g., Linux x64) you can use the following command:

   # just build-s2e-image <image_name>
   $ just build-s2e-image debian-9.2.1-x86_64

Using BinRec

BinRec is a versatile dynamic binary recovery and recompilation platform. As such, it can be used to achieve many different goals at varying levels of complexity. Please refer to BinRec's User Manual for detailed walkthroughs of typical workflows.

Acknowledgements

This material is based upon work supported by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) under Contract No. N00014-21-C-1032. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the ONR.