The Concept of Genetic Reverse-Engineering to Restore the Program’s Source Code from a Binary Code: Theory and Applying Practice

Abstract

Conference Title: 2025 17th International Conference on COMmunication Systems and NETworks (COMSNETS)

Conference Start Date: 2025, Jan. 6

Conference End Date: 2025, Jan. 10

Conference Location: Bengaluru, India

The work is devoted to solving the problem of restoring the representation of the source code of a program (and in the future, algorithms, architecture, etc.) in the form of a binary code, which will allow searching for vulnerabilities in them more effectively. For this purpose, it is proposed to use reverse-engineering based on genetic algorithms. The concept of genetic reverse-engineering, consisting of a sequence of deevolutions of individual representations of the program, and created necessary model-algorithmic instrumentry, is described. The results of experiments on restoring the source code for a non-trivial mathematical expression by various methods and the obtained operating time are presented: by expert groups – 30, 15 and 3-5 minutes, by smart brute-force – 10 minutes, by a genetic de-evolution prototype (as a special case of full reverse-engineering) – 0.5 minutes.