CFG2VEC: Hierarchical Graph Neural Network for Cross-Architectural Software Reverse Engineering

Mission-critical embedded software is critical to our society’s infrastructure but can be subject to new security vulnerabilities as technology advances. When security issues arise, Reverse Engineers (REs) use Software Reverse Engineering (SRE) tools to analyze vulnerable binaries. However, existing tools have limited support, and REs undergo a time-consuming, costly, and error-prone process that requires experience and expertise to understand the behaviors of software and vulnerabilities. To improve these tools, we propose cfg2vec, a Hierarchical Graph Neural Network (GNN) based approach. To represent binary, we propose a novel Graph-of-Graph (GoG) representation, combining the information of control-flow and function-call graphs. Our cfg2vec learns how to represent each binary function compiled from various CPU architectures, utilizing hierarchical GNN and the siamese network-based supervised learning architecture. We evaluate cfg2vec’s capability of predicting function names from stripped binaries. Our results show that cfg2vec outperforms the state-of-the-art by 24.54% in predicting function names and can even achieve 51.84% better given more training data. Additionally, cfg2vec consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art for all CPU architectures, while the baseline requires multiple training to achieve similar performance. More importantly, our results demonstrate that our cfg2vec could tackle binaries built from unseen CPU architectures, thus indicating that our approach can generalize the learned knowledge. Lastly, we demonstrate its practicability by implementing it as a Ghidra plugin used during resolving DARPA Assured MicroPatching (AMP) challenges.