BugClone: Towards Finding Vulnerable Source Code Clones in Binary Executables

Abstract

Vulnerabilities are continuously discovered and common in all software platforms. When some vulnerability is explored at the source code level, there must be a technique to find a similar vulnerable code in binaries; for which source code is not available (firmware, server, etc. binaries). A typical solution would be to compile the vulnerable source code and compare the compiled binary with target binaries. Existing binary code similarity detection techniques are only efficient when both binaries are compiled with the same compilers, architecture, and optimization levels. Different compilers and configurations change with CFG (control flow graph) that eventually makes the comparison error-prone. The main challenge for source-binary similarity detection is that we don’t know the compiler used and its configurations for the target binary and hence the only way is to compile source code with all possible compilation options and compare all resultant binaries with the target binary; which is unrealistic. In this research, we propose a solution to eliminating the many-one comparison by one-one comparison for the source-binary comparison problem. First, we detect the compilation options for the target binary and compile the vulnerable source code using the same compilation configurations. Later, we employ the embedding model-based binary comparison, which is resilient to light compiler optimizations and outcome promising results.