ConFunc: Enhanced Binary Function-Level Representation through Contrastive Learning

Binary code similarity detection (BCSD) has numerous applications, including malware detection, vulnerability search, plagiarism detection, and patch identification. Recent studies have demonstrated that with the rapid progress of machine learning (ML) techniques, various BCSD approaches based on machine learning have exhibited stronger performance than traditional methods. However, current ML-based BCSD approaches tend to ignore the issue of training samples, and most ML-based BCSD approaches are based on supervised learning, which is suffered from the labelling difficulties. To mitigate these issues, we propose ConFunc: a function-level binary code similarity detection framework based on contrastive learning. Performance evaluation shows that ConFunc enhances the Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) and Recall rates (Recall@1) of baseline models by fully harnessing the potential of the data. Additionally, ConFunc demonstrates stronger performance in scenarios with scarce data, achieving the baseline model’s performance on the entire dataset using only 10% of the complete dataset. In real-world patch identification and vulnerability search tasks, ConFunc consistently outperforms other baseline models in MRR and Recall@10.