Having worked on a machine code interpreter for the Modula-2 language for my Compilers project in 1990 and later integrating it into a mixed GPM Modula-2 compiler/interpreter for the 8086 during the summer of 1990-91 meant that I was familiar with assembly language and had a notion of transforming an intermediate representation into executable assembly code. Enjoying compilers and hearing about the latest viruses that were becoming popular in DOS binaries raised my interest in looking into binaries/executable programs to determine how to reverse compile them back into a high-level language representation, to be able to aid with an automated tool in understanding what the virus code was doing. And hence I enrolled in a PhD in April 1991. Close to 32 years ago, on 4th July 1994, I submitted my PhD thesis on "Reverse Compilation Techniques". Little did I know that such a fun project, looking into 80286 DOS binaries and reading assembly, drawing graphs of groups of assembly instructions, understanding how parameters were passed in assembly language, determining what optimising compilers would do to optimised parameters and code, following variables through a function and the whole program to understand data flows and how variables were stored on the stack or memory; would result in techniques that would be picked up in the 2000s with the growing interest in application security. In this keynote I give a retrospective on the decompilation PhD work, the growing interest on this technology throughout the past three decades, examples of commercial uses of decompilation, and conclude with current AI work that enables further analyses in decompilers.

Join Dr Cristina Cifuentes at the Connect Stage for an informal session to network, change ideas, and discuss the themes presented at her keynote.