DeepDual-SD: Deep Dual Attribute-Aware Embedding for Binary Code Similarity Detection

Abstract

Abstract Binary code similarity detection (BCSD) is a task of detecting similarity of binary functions which are not available to the corresponding source code. It has been widely utilized to facilitate various kinds of crucial security analysis in software engineering. Because of the complexity of the program compilation process, identifying binary code similarity presents tough challenges. The most sensible binary similarity detector relies on a robust vector representation of binary code. However, few BCSD approaches are suitable to form vector representations for analyzing similarities between binaries, which may not only diverge in semantics but also in structures. And the existing solutions which only depend on hands-on feature engineering to form feature vectors, fail to take into consideration the relationships between instructions. To resolve these problems, we propose a novel and unified approach called DeepDual-SD that aims to combine the dual attributes (semantic and structural attribute). More specifically, DeepDual-SD consists of two branches, in which one text-based feature representation is driven by semantic attribute learning to exploit instruction semantics, another graph-based feature representation for structural attribute learning to investigate structural differences. Meanwhile deep embedding (DE) technology is utilized to map this information into low-dimensional vector representation. In addition, to get together the dual attributes, a fusion mechanism based on gate architecture is designed for learning to pay proper attention between the two attribute-aware embeddings. Experimental verifications are conducted on Openssl and Debian datasets for several tasks, including cross-compiler, cross-architecture and cross-version scenarios. The results demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art BCSD methods in different scenarios in terms of detection accuracy.

Keywords

• Code similarity detection
• Deep embedding
• Semantic attribute learning
• Structural attribute learning
• Fusion mechanism