Asteria-Pro: Enhancing Deep-Learning Based Binary Code Similarity Detection by Incorporating Domain Knowledge

Abstract

The widespread code reuse allows vulnerabilities to proliferate among a vast variety of firmware. There is an urgent need to detect these vulnerable code effectively and efficiently. By measuring code similarities, AI-based binary code similarity detection is applied to detecting vulnerable code at scale. Existing studies have proposed various function features to capture the commonality for similarity detection. Nevertheless, the significant code syntactic variability induced by the diversity of IoT hardware architectures diminishes the accuracy of binary code similarity detection. In our earlier study and the tool Asteria, we adopt a Tree-LSTM network to summarize function semantics as function commonality and the evaluation result indicates an advanced performance. However, it still has utility concerns due to excessive time costs and inadequate precision while searching for large-scale firmware bugs. To this end, we propose a novel deep learning enhancement architecture by incorporating domain knowledge-based pre-filtration and re-ranking modules, and we develop a prototype based on Asteria called Asteria-Pro. Pre-filtration module seeks to eliminates dissimilar functions to boost subsequent deep learning model calculations, while re-ranking module aims to raises the rankings of vulnerable functions among candidates generated by deep learning model. Our evaluation indicates that pre-filtration module cuts the calculation time by 96.9% and re-ranking improves MRR and Recall by 23.71% and 36.4%. By incorporating the pre-filtration and re-ranking modules, Asteria-Pro outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches in bug search task, by a significant large margin. We conduct a large-scale real-world firmware bug search and Asteria-Pro manages to detect 1,482 vulnerable functions with a high precision 91.65%.