Visual Analysis of Control Coupling for Executables

Abstract

Program comprehension of stripped executables is hard because neither modules and function names, nor any other structural information are available. We introduce an algorithm that, using morphological operations, highlights fan-in, fan-out, and module coupling in the adjacency matrix of the control flow graph and thus allows initial orientation at function level. This paper introduces the structures of interest and our algorithm, and analyzes the yaboot bootloader.