Attend a seminar on the 30 year journey of compilation to decompilation on Sept. 18
Join the Center for Cybersecurity and Trusted Foundations as they host Cristina Cifuentes, vice president of Oracle Software Assurance, for a seminar titled, “From Student of Compilation to Mother of Decompilation — 30 Years Edition.”
Having worked on a machine code interpreter for the Modula-2 language for her Compilers project in 1990 and later integrating it into a mixed GPM Modula-2 compiler/interpreter for the 8086 during the summer of 1990, Cifuentes was familiar with assembly language and had a notion of transforming an intermediate representation into executable assembly code. Enjoying compilers and hearing about the latest viruses that were becoming popular in DOS binaries raised her interest in looking into binaries/executable programs to determine how to reverse-compile them back into a high-level language representation, to be able to aid with an automated tool in understanding what the virus code was doing. Hence, she enrolled in a doctoral program in April 1991.
Thirty years ago, Cifuentes submitted her doctoral thesis on “Reverse Compilation Techniques.” Little did she know that such a fun project — looking into 80286 DOS binaries and reading assembly, drawing graphs of groups of assembly instructions, understanding how parameters were passed in assembly language, determining what optimizing compilers would do to optimized parameters and code, following variables through a function and the whole program to understand data flows and how variables were stored on the stack or memory — would result in techniques that would be picked up in the 2000s with the growing interest in application security.
In this keynote, Cifuentes will give a retrospective on the decompilation doctoral work, the growing interest in this technology throughout the past three decades, examples of commercial uses of decompilation and conclude with an application of decompilation to develop a malware analysis tool.
Seminar: From Student of Compilation to Mother of Decompilation — 30 Years Edition
Wednesday, Sept. 18, 2024
Noon–1 p.m.
Brickyard (BYENG) 209, Tempe campus [map]
Attend on zoom