Professor Binoy Ravindran and his team of researchers haven’t just cracked the code – they’ve corrected it.
Using mathematical principles for understanding code behaviors, Ravindran’s group has found that source code in many popular reverse engineering tools such as Ghidra may not be as ironclad as creators intended. Through their mathematical proofs, software programmers now can be sure that their code is free of unintended behaviors attractive to hackers.
Securing the zeros and ones
Security practitioners often assess a program by testing its machine code. These machine codes, made up of a series of zeros and ones, are what’s executed on a computer. However, they can be hard to understand for humans, especially when the original source code used to create the machine code is not available.
With reverse engineering tools, those long and difficult-to-decipher numerical…