Finding bugs in C code with Multi-Level IR and VAST

Intermediate languages (IRs) are what reverse engineers and vulnerability researchers use to see the forest for the trees. IRs are used to view programs at different abstraction layers, so that analysis can understand both low-level code aberrations and higher levels of flawed logic mistakes. The setback is that bug-finding tools are often pigeonholed into choosing a specific IR, because bugs don’t uniformly exist across abstraction levels.

We developed a new tool called VAST that solves this problem by providing a …

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