Hieronym: Leveraging Hierarchical Multi-Source Information for Function Renaming in Stripped Binary

Abstract

Function renaming in stripped binaries can substantially assist reverse engineers by improving code readability, yet it is a challenging task. The difficulty stems from the need to accurately capture function semantics from low-level binary code across diverse instruction sets, architectures, and compiler optimizations, and to express these semantics in concise, human-readable names. Existing approaches either inadequately capture comprehensive function semantics or exhibit limited generalization to previously unseen binaries. In this paper, we present Hieronym, a generative large language model (LLM)-based framework for stripped binary function renaming. Hieronym adopts a hierarchical summarization-driven domain adaptation strategy and integrates multi-source information, including global binary context, local calling context, and intrinsic function semantics, to enhance the LLM's understanding of binary code. To enable systematic evaluation, we further propose a dual-layer evaluation framework that incorporates both token-level and whole-name-level metrics. We evaluate Hieronym on binary functions compiled with four compiler optimization levels (O0-O3) for four architectures (x64, x86, ARM, and MIPS). Experimental results demonstrate that Hieronym significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving token-level improvements of 50.12% in precision, 41.75% in recall, and 45.10% in F1-score, as well as a 79.94% improvement in name-level accuracy, while also exhibiting strong generalization capability. Moreover, experiments on real-world malware samples further validate the practical effectiveness of Hieronym in security-critical scenarios.