Mention the phrase “binary reverse engineering” or “binary analysis” and it often conjures up an image of software pirates or hacking groups. However, there are practical reasons for doing analysis on machine code. For instance, machines don’t run source code, they run machine code – how do we know it’s running correctly? Malware doesn’t usually come with source code (but they are known to leak on occasion); How do we protect our software from discovered vulnerabilities if we’re unable to re-compile the program from the original source code? For three paper Thursday this week, my contribution is to highlight three representative security applications of binary analysis, namely software testing, malware analysis and software protection. (more…)