Every now and then, someone comes along and writes a short novel of a comment on an older post. Such was the case when Sean Barrett used the occasion of my What RE Looks Like post to take three hours of his rather busy life and compose a “symbolic executor” — a basic block decompiler. It’s a valiant effort and I would like to try my hand at it, as with all RE tools. I am having trouble compiling the source he posted (I converted CR format, but I am still having trouble with missing symbols from his custom library-in-a-header-file). It works on Microsoft-compatible disassembly output but probably would not be too hard to adapt for ‘objdump -Mintel’ in the GNU toolchain.

Many people have gone down this basic block disassembly road. The details are hazy but I seem to recall that I have made the journey as well. It’s a good thing I keep this blog as a journal. I guess the reason I can’t remember what my experiment was called is because it was the “Unnamed RE Project”. It looks like all I accomplished there was straight ASM -> C translation without any effort at higher level language abstraction.

Anyway, I still maintain that figuring out the overriding purpose of these basic blocks is not the biggest challenge in traditional binary reverse engineering– indeed, I personally consider it the most interesting part. No, what I think is the toughest part is figuring out — or more likely guessing — what the sometimes hundreds of referenced variables are actually used for, and assigning them appropriate names. The biggest nightmare is when functions pass around multiple gigantic nested structures and actually use a bunch of variables within.

In other words, true understanding of the underlying algorithm is the goal. But, Sean, I still want to try your tool.