Reengineering Modern Industrial Software to Find Vulnerabilities Based on Genetic Algorithms

Modern industry is built, among other things, on software, the presence of vulnerabilities in which is a significant problem. It is more rational to search for vulnerabilities in those representations of the program (source code, algorithms, architecture, etc.) on the basis of which they were developed. However, as a rule, there is difficult-to-analyze machine code available. Obtaining higher-level representations is possible by reverse engineering, carried out in various ways, such as expert, algorithmic, intelligent, enumeration and logging. The qualitative comparison of these representations is given. The current study is devoted to a new method of reverse engineering based on the use of genetic algorithms. The course of the research and the following main scientific results are briefly described: the methodology of reverse engineering of a software system, the model of the life cycle of a program with multi-level vulnerabilities, the concept of genetic de-evolution of program representations, scientific, methodological and algorithmic instrumentation for genetic decompilation, an architectural block for conducting genetic de-evolution of representations with functionality for searching for multi-level vulnerabilities. All results are novel, as well as theoretically and practically significant.