Exploring Program Analysis Abstractions and Intermediate Representations in Binary Ninja

The talk, presented by Kyle from Vector 35 (creators of Binary Ninja), explores abstractions for program analysis, emphasizing that programs fundamentally move and manipulate data, with types serving as the ultimate abstraction to define semantics. It introduces key techniques like Single Static Assignment (SSA), Single Static Information (SSI), and intermediate representations (IRs) such as LLVM IR, VEX, and Ghidra’s P-Code, highlighting their trade-offs in precision, flexibility, and ease of analysis. The speaker demonstrates how these abstractions simplify complex tasks—like detecting malware unpackers, identifying uninitialized variables, or tracing data flows—by reducing problems to parallelizable boolean queries or set operations. Tools like Binary Ninja, IDA Pro, and Valgrind are referenced for their use of IRs, while the talk critiques C as a poor abstraction due to its ambiguity and advocates for stronger type systems to constrain transformations. The discussion also covers normal forms (e.g., conjunctive normal form for SMT solvers) and the halting problem, arguing that real-world constraints make undecidable problems tractable. Key takeaways include leveraging existing tools with robust abstractions rather than building custom compilers and prioritizing context-specific representations over monolithic IRs. The talk concludes by urging the community to develop high-fidelity translations between abstractions to solve diverse program analysis challenges.