Publications

Heros in Action: Analyzing Objective-C Binaries through Decompilation and IFDS

AuthorMagin, Florian; Patat, Gwendal; Scherf, Fabian William
Date2025
TypeConference Paper
AbstractThis paper demonstrates static taint analysis on Objective-C binaries through the integration of the Ghidra framework with the Heros IFDS solver, achieving an inter-procedural, field-sensitive and flow-sensitive analysis. Our contributions include two plugins: one extending Ghidra Objective-C capabilities to improve decompilation accuracy, and another integrating the Heros framework for inter-procedural taint analysis on Ghidra Intermediate Representation (IR).To assess our approach, we introduce a new benchmark suite tailored to Objective-C, covering diverse dataflow challenges and promoting further community-driven research. By leveraging existing frameworks, this work demonstrates how established static analysis techniques can be adapted to binary targets, laying a groundwork for advancements in Objective-C binary analysis.
ConferenceInternational Workshop on Advancing Static Analysis for Researchers and Industry Practitioners in Software Engineering 2025
Urlhttps://publica.fraunhofer.de/handle/publica/490719