著者

Ruijin ZHU Yu-an TAN Quanxin ZHANG Fei WU Jun ZHENG Yuan XUE

出版者

The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers

雑誌

IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems (ISSN:09168532)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.E99.D, no.2, pp.351-359, 2016-02-01 (Released:2016-02-01)

参考文献数

14

被引用文献数

11 18

---

Disassembly, as a principal reverse-engineering tool, is the process of recovering the equivalent assembly instructions of a program's machine code from its binary representation. However, when disassembling a firmware file, the disassembly process cannot be performed well if the image base is unknown. In this paper, we propose an innovative method to determine the image base of a firmware file with ARM/Thumb instruction set. First, based on the characteristics of the function entry table (FET) for an ARM processor, an algorithm called FIND-FET is proposed to identify the function entry tables. Second, by using the most common instructions of function prologue and FETs, the FIND-BASE algorithm is proposed to determine the candidate image base by counting the matched functions and then choose the one with maximal matched FETs as the final result. The algorithms are applied on some firmwares collected from the Internet, and results indicate that they can effectively find out the image base for the majority of example firmware files.