An Empirical Study on ARM Disassembly Tools [pdf]

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#ABSTRACT

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With the increasing popularity of embedded devices,ARM isbecom-

ing the dominant architecture for them. In the meanwhile, there is

a pressing need to perform security assessments for these devices.

Due to different types of peripherals, it is challenging to dynami-

cally run the firmware of these devices in an emulated environment.

Therefore, the static analysis is still commonly used. Existing work

usually leverages off-the-shelf tools to disassemble stripped ARM

binaries and (implicitly) assume that reliable disassembling binaries

and function recognition are solved problems. However, whether

this assumption really holds is unknown.

In this paper, we conduct the first comprehensive study on

ARM disassembly tools. Specifically, we build 1 , 896 ARM bina-

ries (including 248 obfuscated ones) with different compilers, com-

piling options, and obfuscation methods. We then evaluate them

using eight state-of-the-art ARM disassembly tools (including both

commercial and noncommercial ones) on their capabilities to lo-

cate instructions and function boundaries. These two are funda-

mental ones, which are leveraged to build other primitives. Our

work reveals some observations that have not been systemati-

cally summarized and/or confirmed. For instance, we find that

the existence of both ARM and Thumb instruction sets, and the

reuse of the BL instruction for both function calls and branches

bring serious challenges to disassembly tools. Our evaluation sheds

light on the limitations of state-of-the-art disassembly tools and

points out potential directions for improvement. To engage the

community, we release the data set, and the related scripts at

https://github.com/valour01/arm_disasssembler_study.