The design of a resourceable and retargetable binary translator

Binary translation, the automatic translation of executable programs from one machine to another, requires analyses and transformations that could be used in a wide variety of tools intended to reverse engineer binary codes. Our approach to binary translation, which is designed to allow both source and target machines to be changed at low cost, is based on a combination of machine descriptions, binary-interface descriptions, and machine-independent analyses. This approach is producing components and component generators that should be usable in a variety of tools for reverse engineering binary codes. This paper presents an overview of the full design and gives excerpts from descriptions used in component generators, and presents preliminary results of four static translators instantiated from the UQBT framework described in this paper.