ModX: binary level partially imported third-party library detection via program modularization and semantic matching

• Main Authors: Yang, Can, Xu, Zhengzi, Chen, Hongxu, Liu, Yang, Gong, Xiaorui, Liu, Baoxu
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Codes; Feature extraction; Libraries; Program Modularization; Reverse engineering; Semantic Matcing; Semantics; Software algorithms; Syntactics; Third-Party Library Detection
• ISSN: 1558-1225
• DOI: 10.1145/3510003.3510627

With the rapid growth of software, using third-party libraries (TPLs) has become increasingly popular. The prosperity of the library usage has provided the software engineers with a handful of methods to facilitate and boost the program development. Unfortunately, it also poses great challenges as it becomes much more difficult to manage the large volume of libraries. Researches and studies have been proposed to detect and understand the TPLs in the software. However, most existing approaches rely on syntactic features, which are not robust when these features are changed or deliberately hidden by the adversarial parties. Moreover, these approaches typically model each of the imported libraries as a whole, therefore, cannot be applied to scenarios where the host software only partially uses the library code segments. To detect both fully and partially imported TPLs at the semantic level, we propose ModX, a framework that leverages novel program modularization techniques to decompose the program into fine-grained functionality-based modules. By extracting both syntactic and semantic features, it measures the distance between modules to detect similar library module reuse in the program. Experimental results show that ModX outperforms other modularization tools by distinguishing more coherent program modules with 353% higher module quality scores and beats other TPL detection tools with on average 17% better in precision and 8% better in recall.