Enabling Constraint-based Binary Reconfiguration by Binary Analysis

Abstract

Today’s adaptable architectures require configurability
and adaptability to be supported already at design level.
However, modern software products are often constructed out
of reusable but non-adaptable and/or legacy software artifacts
(e.g. libraries) to meet early time-to-market requirements. Thus,
modern adaptable architectures are rarely used in commercial
applications, because the effort to add adaptability to the reused
software artifacts is just too high. In this paper, we propose a
methodology to semi-automatically configure existing binaries on
a given set of constraints. It is based on building the annotated
control flow graph to identify and remove unused code on static
basic block level depending on different execution requirements
given as a set of constraints. This allows for adaptation of binaries
after compile time without the use of source code. We then
propose a way of adding additional reconfiguration support to
these configured binary objects. With this approach, adaption
and reconfiguration can be added with a low effort to nonadaptive
software.