Analyzing and revivifying function signature inference using deep learning

Function signature plays an important role in binary analysis and security enhancement, with typical examples in bug finding and control-flow integrity enforcement. However, recovery of function signatures by static binary analysis is challenging since crucial information vital for such recovery is stripped off during compilation. Although function signature recovery using deep learning (DL) is proposed in an effort to handle such challenges, the reported accuracy is low for binaries compiled with optimizations. In this paper, we first perform a systematic study to quantify the extent to which compiler optimizations (negatively) impact the accuracy of existing DL techniques based on Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) for function signature recovery. Our experiments show that the state-of-the-art DL technique has its accuracy dropped from 98.7