On the Impact of Exception Handling Compatibility on Binary Instrumentation† Soumyakant Priyadarshan Huan Nguyen R. Sekar Stony Brook University Stony Brook University Stony Brook University Stony Brook, NY, USA Stony Brook, NY, USA Stony Brook, NY, USA
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Abstract overheads, but has been held back by challenges in accurate dis- assembly and code pointer identification. With the emergence of To support C++ exception handling, compilers generate metadata position-independent (or relocatable) binaries as the dominant for- that is a rich source of information about the code layout. On mat in recent years, researchers have been able to address these Linux, this metadata is also used to support stack tracing, thread challenges, e.g., in Egalito [41], RetroWrite [11] and SBR[28, 29] cleanup and other functions. For this reason, Linux binaries contain systems. code-layout-revealing metadata for C-code as well. Even hand- written assembly in low-level system libraries is covered by such Despite recent advances, deployability of binary instrumentation metadata. We investigate the implications of this metadata in this continues to face significant challenges. One of the major concerns paper, and show that it can be used to (a) improve accuracy of is compatibility. In particular, existing static binary instrumentation disassembly, (b) achieve significantly better accuracy at function tools tend to break stack tracing (for C and C++) as well as C++ boundary identification as compared to previous research, and(c) exception handling. While compatibility with these features may as a rich source of information for defeating fine-grained code not be important for proof-of-concept instrumentations, it is hardly randomization.