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What is the largest program that has been analyzed by a semantics-based static binary analysis?

By semantics-based, I mean an analysis that examines the meaning of the program, and does not simply perform a computation on the syntax of the program, such as computing an md5sum.

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  • Would you count the SAGE system from Microsoft? Also, someone should ask Veracode what the largest program they've analyzed is...
    – Andrew
    Mar 27, 2013 at 20:35
  • @Andrew As far as I know, SAGE is completely dynamic.
    – Ed McMan
    Mar 27, 2013 at 20:47

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The largest static analysis example I am aware of is 32,405 PPC instructions from this paper on CFG recovery. There is no analysis performed besides recovering the CFG.

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    Is decompilation considered a static analysis? It should be, seeing as it does not execute the program. And in which case, Hex-Rays does bigger jobs than that every day.
    – Rolf Rolles
    Mar 27, 2013 at 22:14
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    Also, in the deobfuscation example in my recent presentation [1], which is a static analysis, I have applied it to huge binaries on a very regular basis. I think in order for this question or its answers to have any meaning, the term "static binary analysis" needs to be precisely defined.
    – Rolf Rolles
    Mar 27, 2013 at 22:32
  • @Syzygy Decompilation seems like fair game to me. The link to your presentation does not seem to work, by the way.
    – Ed McMan
    Mar 27, 2013 at 22:37
  • Whoops ... that reference is [1] ruxconbreakpoint.com/assets/Uploads/bpx/… ;-)
    – Rolf Rolles
    Mar 27, 2013 at 22:41
  • @Syzygy So how big is "huge"?
    – Ed McMan
    Mar 28, 2013 at 2:00

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