Cross-Platform Binary Code Homology Analysis Based on GRU Graph Embedding

Binary code homology analysis refers to detecting whether two pieces of binary code are compiled from the same piece of source code, which is a fundamental technique for many security applications, such as vulnerability search, plagiarism detection, and malware detection. With the increase in critical vulnerabilities in IoT devices, homology analysis is increasingly needed to perform cross-platform vulnerability searches. Existing methods for cross-platform binary code homology detection usually convert binary code to instruction sequences and do semantic embedding of the sequences as if they were natural language. However, the gap between natural language and binary code is large, and the spatial features of the binary code are easily lost by directly comparing the semantics. In this paper, we propose a GRU-based graph embedding method to compare the homology of binary functions. First, the attribute control flow graph (ACFG) is built for the assembly function, then the GRU-based graph embedding neural network is used to generate the embedding vector for the ACFG, and finally the homology of the binary code is determined by calculating the distance between the embedding vectors. The experimental results show that our method greatly improves the detection accuracy of negative samples compared with Gemini, the latest method based on graph embedding binary code similarity detection.