Reimagining Disassembly Interfaces With Visualization: Combining Instruction Tracing and Control Flow With DisViz.

Area of Science:

• Computer Science
• Software Engineering
• Program Analysis

Background:

• Analyzing compiled binaries for performance is crucial but challenging due to complex instruction mapping.
• Current disassembly interfaces often lack structure or execution order, hindering comprehension.
• Increasing source code size further complicates the analysis of compiler transformations.

Purpose of the Study:

• To design and evaluate a novel visual interface for disassembly code.
• To improve the understanding and navigation of compiled binaries for application developers.
• To address the limitations of existing disassembly tools by integrating control flow and execution order.

Main Methods:

• Developed a new visual layout for disassembly instructions, grouping them into basic blocks.
• Implemented a block-based mini-map to provide context across large numbers of instructions.
• Integrated the visualization into a web-based tool, DisViz, with dynamic source code linking.
• Validated the tool through design study methodology and evaluation sessions with ten participants.

Main Results:

• The novel layout intuitively displays looping structures.
• The block-based mini-map effectively shows context within thousands of disassembly instructions.
• Participants successfully completed evaluation tasks, demonstrating the utility of the integrated view.
• The DisViz tool was found to be helpful for understanding and navigating disassembly code.

Conclusions:

• The integrated visual interface effectively combines execution order and control flow structure.
• DisViz enhances the ability of application developers to analyze and understand compiled binaries.
• The developed tool represents a significant improvement over traditional disassembly interfaces.