RL-Bin, Robust Low-overhead Binary Rewriter.

Binary rewriters are used to ensure security properties or optimize and reduce runtime of existing binary applications. Existing binary rewriters are either static or dynamic, and both have severe shortcomings. Existing static rewriters have low overhead, but cannot rewrite correctly for all binaries. Existing dynamic rewriters are robust, but have high overhead - for example, for a subset of SPEC'06 benchmarks we measured, their overhead is 1.59X for PIN and 1.32X for DynamoRIO. Because of this high overhead, they are limited to off line testing, and cannot be used in deployment. We have built the first binary rewriter called RL-Bin which can rewrite all binaries correctly, but has low overhead (averaging 1.09X for our programs.) This makes it practical for continuous use in deployed software for the first time. This paper represents an early snapshot of on-going research, and we hope to bring this overhead down even further in the future. We have also shown how RL-Bin can be used to enforce CFI, a security mechanism.