Control Structure Analysis and Recovery of Embedded Binaries

Existing decompilers use rule‐based algorithms to transform unstructured Control flow graph (CFG) into equivalent high‐level programming language constructs with “goto” statements. One problem of such approaches is that they generate a large number of “goto”s in the output code, which reduce the readability and hinder the understanding of input binaries. A global search algorithm is proposed based on structural analysis. This algorithm restructures a CFG and generates fewer number of “goto” statements than the rule‐based algorithm does. We also present a Genetic algorithm (GA) for the global search approach to locate near optimal solutions for large CFGs. Evaluation results on a set of real CFGs show that the genetic algorithm‐based heuristic for global search is capable of finding high‐quality solutions.