Decompiler Wiki

decompiler.wiki aims to demystify the internals of decompilers.

Contributing

We need your help and feedback! This website aims to be collaboratively edited by anyone.

  • If you have any suggestions for a page, leave a comment below the page.
  • Directly click the edit button on the top right corner to make a pull request.
  • Discuss something about decompilation? Open a thread in the discussion.
  • Introduce something about decompilation? Create an entry (a markdown file) under src/entries, and add to the SUMMARY.md

Contents

Currently, there are the main parts of the content:

Similar Projects

The decompiler.wiki Website

Development

Architecture

  • Use mdbook instead of wiki engines. Wiki engines requires a dedicated server. It's hard to maintain a server and keep it running stably.
  • Use giscuz as the comment system.
  • Deploy to the gh-pages branch.

Writing

See mdBook documentation.

Awesome Decompilers

TODO

A Systematic Literature Review of Decompilation

This page contains a systematic literature review of binary decompilation. For the introduction of SLR, check here.

Background

The technique of decompilation still has significant limitations, as existing research on [lifter sok] and [fidelity issue] demonstrates. This indicates that there is still a lot of room for improvement in decompilers.

TODO

Research Question

Search Strategy

Keywords: Decompilation OR Decompiler OR Decompile

Search Process

Paper Repositories: Important paper repositories covered in findpapers: IEEE Xplore, ACM, Scopus, arXiv. Other important conference: Usenix, NDSS, DBLP.

Steps:

  • Follow the usage of the tool findpapers
    • Apply for access keys for IEEE and scorpus.
    • using this command: (findpapers 0.6.7, 2024-02-03, the generated json file can be downloaded here.) 
      findpapers search ./search.json --token-ieee "$IEEE_TOKEN" --token-scopus "$SCOPUS_TOKEN" -q "[decompile] OR [decompiling] OR [decompiler] OR [decompilation]"

Study Selection Criteria

  • Language: English

What is Systematic Literature Review?

What is SLR?

The systematic literature review originates from medical research and social science but has been adapted and extended to Software Engineering.

To simplify:

  • It is based on a defined search strategy that aims to detect as much of the relevant literature as possible.
  • If some literature is excluded, it requires explicit inclusion and exclusion criteria to assess each potential primary study.
  • Specify the information to be obtained from each primary study including quality criteria by which to evaluate each primary study.

Other types of review：

  • Systematic Mapping Studies: plot the studies to find clusters and deserts to identify potential research areas or direct the focus of future systematic reviews.
  • Tertiary Reviews: a systematic review of systematic reviews to answer wider research questions. (If a number of systematic reviews exist already).

Is a SLR needed?

  • Can you find an important software engineering question, which the review addressed?
  • Was a thorough search done? Were all potentially important sources explored?

What is a SoK Paper?

The SoK paper aims to provide a high value to the community. Sometimes the community seems to lose memory of things that have been done in the past and produces too many incremental results that don't always lead to a better general understanding.

The SLR Process

The SLR process is iterative. For example, remember to refine the inclusion and exclusion criteria.

Research Question

  • Identifying the impact of technologies on reliability and performance.
  • Is meaningful and important to practitioners as well as researchers.
    • identify and/or scope future research activities.
  • Will lead either to changes in current practice or to increased confidence in the value of current practice.
  • Will identify discrepancies between commonly held beliefs and reality.

Filtering

If there are too many articles, you can filter them by:

  • Study Type
    • include: Review and original content
    • exclude: Reports, thesis, and editorials
  • Source: Peer-reviewed articles, Conference proceedings.
  • Year of Publication: filter out something too old
  • Language: e.g., only include English
  • Techniques

Tools

Places to find tools:

  • Systematic​ ​Literature​ ​Review​ ​in Computer​ ​Science​ ​-​ ​A​ ​Practical​ ​Guide
  • "SEGRESS: Software Engineering Guidelines for REporting Secondary Studies"
  • "Guidelines for performing Systematic Literature Reviews in Software Engineering"
    • Section 2 provides an introduction to systematic reviews.
    • Section 3 explains why social science SLR methodology is appropriate in the context of software engineering research.
    • Section 4 specifies the stages in a systematic review.
    • Section 5 discusses the planning stages of a systematic review.
      • Identification of the need for a review (See Section 5.1).
      • Commissioning a review (See Section 5.2).
      • Specifying the research question(s) (See Section 5.3). (The most important)
      • Developing a review protocol (See Section 5.4).
      • Evaluating the review protocol (See Section 5.5).
    • Section 6 discusses the stages involved in conducting a systematic review.
      • Identification of research (See Section 6.1).
      • Selection of primary studies (See Section 6.2).
      • Study quality assessment (See Section 6.3).
      • Data extraction and monitoring (See Section 6.4).
      • Data synthesis (See Section 6.5).
    • Section 7 discusses reporting a systematic review.
      • Specifying dissemination mechanisms (See Section 7.1).
      • Formatting the main report (See Section 7.2).
      • Evaluating the report (See Section 7.3).
    • Section 8 discusses systematic mapping studies.

Entries

This section contains entries that have not been categorized.