Thomas W. Reps
Thomas W. Reps (born 28 May 1956, United States) is an American computer scientist known for his contributions to automatic program analysis. Dr. Reps is Professor of Computer Science in the Computer Sciences Department of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, which he joined in 1985. Reps is the author or co-author of four books and more than one hundred seventy-five papers describing his research. His work has covered a wide variety of topics, including program slicing, data-flow analysis, pointer analysis, model checking, computer security, instrumentation (computer programming), language-based program-development environments, the use of program profiling in software testing, software renovation, incremental algorithms, and attribute grammars. Reps’s current work focuses on static analysis of stripped (binary) executables, and methods that—without relying on symbol-table or debugging information—recover intermediate representations that are similar to th ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
University Of Wisconsin–Madison
The University of Wisconsin–Madison (University of Wisconsin, Wisconsin, UW, UW–Madison, or simply Madison) is a public land-grant research university in Madison, Wisconsin. Founded when Wisconsin achieved statehood in 1848, UW–Madison is the official state university of Wisconsin and the flagship campus of the University of Wisconsin System. It was the first public university established in Wisconsin and remains the oldest and largest public university in the state. It became a land-grant institution in 1866. The main campus, located on the shores of Lake Mendota, includes four National Historic Landmarks. The university also owns and operates the University of Wisconsin–Madison Arboretum, located south of the main campus, which is also a National Historic Landmark. UW–Madison is organized into 20 schools and colleges, which enrolled 33,506 undergraduate, 9,772 graduate, 1,968 special, and 2,686 professional students in 2021. Its academic programs include 136 u ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Profiling (computer Programming)
In software engineering, profiling ("program profiling", "software profiling") is a form of dynamic program analysis that measures, for example, the space (memory) or time complexity of a program, the usage of particular instructions, or the frequency and duration of function calls. Most commonly, profiling information serves to aid program optimization, and more specifically, performance engineering. Profiling is achieved by instrumenting either the program source code or its binary executable form using a tool called a ''profiler'' (or ''code profiler''). Profilers may use a number of different techniques, such as event-based, statistical, instrumented, and simulation methods. Gathering program events Profilers use a wide variety of techniques to collect data, including hardware interrupts, code instrumentation, instruction set simulation, operating system hooks, and performance counters. Use of profilers The output of a profiler may be: * A statistical ''sum ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Decompiler
A decompiler is a computer program that translates an executable file to a high-level source file which can be recompiled successfully. It does therefore the opposite of a typical compiler, which translates a high-level language to a low-level language. Decompilers are usually unable to perfectly reconstruct the original source code, thus frequently will produce obfuscated code. Nonetheless, decompilers remain an important tool in the reverse engineering of computer software. Introduction The term ''decompiler'' is most commonly applied to a program which translates executable programs (the output from a compiler) into source code in a (relatively) high level language which, when compiled, will produce an executable whose behavior is the same as the original executable program. By comparison, a disassembler translates an executable program into assembly language (and an assembler could be used for assembling it back into an executable program). Decompilation is the act of using a ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Disassembler
A disassembler is a computer program that translates machine language into assembly language—the inverse operation to that of an assembler. A disassembler differs from a decompiler, which targets a high-level language rather than an assembly language. Disassembly, the output of a disassembler, is often formatted for human-readability rather than suitability for input to an assembler, making it principally a reverse-engineering tool. Assembly language source code generally permits the use of constants and programmer comments. These are usually removed from the assembled machine code by the assembler. If so, a disassembler operating on the machine code would produce disassembly lacking these constants and comments; the disassembled output becomes more difficult for a human to interpret than the original annotated source code. Some disassemblers provide a built-in code commenting feature where the generated output gets enriched with comments regarding called API functions or parame ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
High-level Language
In computer science, a high-level programming language is a programming language with strong abstraction from the details of the computer. In contrast to low-level programming languages, it may use natural language ''elements'', be easier to use, or may automate (or even hide entirely) significant areas of computing systems (e.g. memory management), making the process of developing a program simpler and more understandable than when using a lower-level language. The amount of abstraction provided defines how "high-level" a programming language is. In the 1960s, a high-level programming language using a compiler was commonly called an ''autocode''. Examples of autocodes are COBOL and Fortran. The first high-level programming language designed for computers was Plankalkül, created by Konrad Zuse. However, it was not implemented in his time, and his original contributions were largely isolated from other developments due to World War II, aside from the language's influence on t ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Compiler
In computing, a compiler is a computer program that translates computer code written in one programming language (the ''source'' language) into another language (the ''target'' language). The name "compiler" is primarily used for programs that translate source code from a high-level programming language to a low-level programming language (e.g. assembly language, object code, or machine code) to create an executable program. Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools by Alfred V. Aho, Ravi Sethi, Jeffrey D. Ullman - Second Edition, 2007 There are many different types of compilers which produce output in different useful forms. A ''cross-compiler'' produces code for a different CPU or operating system than the one on which the cross-compiler itself runs. A ''bootstrap compiler'' is often a temporary compiler, used for compiling a more permanent or better optimised compiler for a language. Related software include, a program that translates from a low-level language to a h ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Intermediate Representation
An intermediate representation (IR) is the data structure or code used internally by a compiler or virtual machine to represent source code. An IR is designed to be conducive to further processing, such as optimization and translation. A "good" IR must be ''accurate'' – capable of representing the source code without loss of information – and ''independent'' of any particular source or target language. An IR may take one of several forms: an in-memory data structure, or a special tuple- or stack-based code readable by the program. In the latter case it is also called an ''intermediate language''. A canonical example is found in most modern compilers. For example, the CPython interpreter transforms the linear human-readable text representing a program into an intermediate graph structure that allows flow analysis and re-arrangement before execution. Use of an intermediate representation such as this allows compiler systems like the GNU Compiler Collection and LLVM to be use ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Debugger
A debugger or debugging tool is a computer program used to software testing, test and debugging, debug other programs (the "target" program). The main use of a debugger is to run the target program under controlled conditions that permit the programmer to track its execution and monitor changes in computer resources that may indicate malfunctioning code. Typical debugging facilities include the ability to run or halt the target program at specific points, display the contents of memory, CPU registers or storage devices (such as disk drives), and modify memory or register contents in order to enter selected test data that might be a cause of faulty program execution. The code to be examined might alternatively be running on an ''instruction set simulator'' (ISS), a technique that allows great power in its ability to halt when specific conditions are encountered, but which will typically be somewhat slower than executing the code directly on the appropriate (or the same) processor ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Symbol Table
In computer science, a symbol table is a data structure used by a language translator such as a compiler or interpreter, where each identifier (or symbols), constants, procedures and functions in a program's source code is associated with information relating to its declaration or appearance in the source. In other words, the entries of a symbol table store the information related to the entry's corresponding symbol. Background A symbol table may only exist in memory during the translation process, or it may be embedded in the output of the translation, such as in an ABI object file for later use. For example, it might be used during an interactive debugging session, or as a resource for formatting a diagnostic report during or after execution of a program. Description The minimum information contained in a symbol table used by a translator and intermediate representation (IR) includes the symbol's name and its location or address. For a compiler targeting a platform with a ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Executable
In computing, executable code, an executable file, or an executable program, sometimes simply referred to as an executable or binary, causes a computer "to perform indicated tasks according to encoded instruction (computer science), instructions", as opposed to a data (computing), data file that must be interpreted (parser, parsed) by a program to be meaningful. The exact interpretation depends upon the use. "Instructions" is traditionally taken to mean machine code instructions for a physical central processing unit, CPU. In some contexts, a file containing scripting instructions (such as bytecode) may also be considered executable. Generation of executable files Executable files can be hand-coded in machine language, although it is far more convenient to develop software as source code in a high-level language that can be easily understood by humans. In some cases, source code might be specified in assembly language instead, which remains human-readable while being close ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Machine Code
In computer programming, machine code is any low-level programming language, consisting of machine language instructions, which are used to control a computer's central processing unit (CPU). Each instruction causes the CPU to perform a very specific task, such as a load, a store, a jump, or an arithmetic logic unit (ALU) operation on one or more units of data in the CPU's registers or memory. Early CPUs had specific machine code that might break backwards compatibility with each new CPU released. The notion of an instruction set architecture (ISA) defines and specifies the behavior and encoding in memory of the instruction set of the system, without specifying its exact implementation. This acts as an abstraction layer, enabling compatibility within the same family of CPUs, so that machine code written or generated according to the ISA for the family will run on all CPUs in the family, including future CPUs. In general, each architecture family (e.g. x86, ARM) has its own ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Static Program Analysis
In computer science, static program analysis (or static analysis) is the analysis of computer programs performed without executing them, in contrast with dynamic program analysis, which is performed on programs during their execution. The term is usually applied to analysis performed by an automated tool, with human analysis typically being called "program understanding", program comprehension, or code review. In the last of these, software inspection and software walkthroughs are also used. In most cases the analysis is performed on some version of a program's source code, and, in other cases, on some form of its object code. Rationale The sophistication of the analysis performed by tools varies from those that only consider the behaviour of individual statements and declarations, to those that include the complete source code of a program in their analysis. The uses of the information obtained from the analysis vary from highlighting possible coding errors (e.g., the lint t ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |