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Honey, I Shrunk the ELFs: Lightweight Binary Tailoring of Shared Libraries

Authors:

Andreas Ziegler,

Bernhard Heinloth,

Daniel LohmannAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS), Volume 18, Issue 5s

Article No.: 102, Pages 1 - 23

https://doi.org/10.1145/3358222

Published: 08 October 2019 Publication History

Abstract

In the embedded domain, industrial sectors (i.e., automotive industry, avionics) are undergoing radical changes. They broadly adopt commodity hardware and move away from special-purpose control units. During this transition, heterogeneous software components are consolidated to run on commodity operating systems.

To efficiently consolidate such components, a modular encapsulation of common functionality into reusable binary files (i.e., shared libraries) is essential. However, shared libraries are often unnecessarily large as they entail a lot of generic functionality that is not required in a narrowly defined scenario. As the source code of proprietary components is often unavailable and the industry is heading towards binary-only distribution, we propose an approach towards lightweight binary tailoring.

As demonstrated in the evaluation, lightweight binary tailoring effectively reduces the amount of code in all shared libraries on a Linux-based system by 63 percent and shrinks their files by 17 percent. The reduction in size is beneficial to cut down costs (e.g., lower storage and memory footprint) and eases code analyses that are necessary for code audits.

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Cited By

Wodiany IPop ALuján MFilkov VRay BZhou M(2024)LeanBin: Harnessing Lifting and Recompilation to Debloat BinariesProceedings of the 39th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1145/3691620.3695515(1434-1446)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3691620.3695515
He JHou PYu JQi JSun YLi LZhao RWu Y(2024)D-Linker: Debloating Shared Libraries by Relinking From Object FilesIEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems10.1109/TCAD.2024.344671243:11(3768-3779)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TCAD.2024.3446712
Wang XHui TZhao LCheng YChandra SBlincoe KTonella P(2023)Input-Driven Dynamic Program Debloating for Code-Reuse Attack MitigationProceedings of the 31st ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3611643.3616274(934-946)Online publication date: 30-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3611643.3616274
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Honey, I Shrunk the ELFs: Lightweight Binary Tailoring of Shared Libraries
1. Computer systems organization
  1. Embedded and cyber-physical systems
    1. Embedded systems
      1. Embedded software
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Software libraries and repositories
    2. Software maintenance tools

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems

ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems Volume 18, Issue 5s

Special Issue ESWEEK 2019, CASES 2019, CODES+ISSS 2019 and EMSOFT 2019

October 2019

1423 pages

ISSN:1539-9087

EISSN:1558-3465

DOI:10.1145/3365919

Editor:
Sandeep K. Shukla
Indian Institute of Technology, India

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2019 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Journal Family

ACM Journals for the Design of Smart and Connected Systems

Publication History

Published: 08 October 2019

Accepted: 01 July 2019

Revised: 01 June 2019

Received: 01 April 2019

Published in TECS Volume 18, Issue 5s

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Cited By

Wodiany IPop ALuján MFilkov VRay BZhou M(2024)LeanBin: Harnessing Lifting and Recompilation to Debloat BinariesProceedings of the 39th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1145/3691620.3695515(1434-1446)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3691620.3695515
He JHou PYu JQi JSun YLi LZhao RWu Y(2024)D-Linker: Debloating Shared Libraries by Relinking From Object FilesIEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems10.1109/TCAD.2024.344671243:11(3768-3779)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TCAD.2024.3446712
Wang XHui TZhao LCheng YChandra SBlincoe KTonella P(2023)Input-Driven Dynamic Program Debloating for Code-Reuse Attack MitigationProceedings of the 31st ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3611643.3616274(934-946)Online publication date: 30-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3611643.3616274
Rommel FDietrich CZiegler AOstapyshyn ILohmann DEgger BLee D(2023)Thread-Level Attack-Surface ReductionProceedings of the 24th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGBED International Conference on Languages, Compilers, and Tools for Embedded Systems10.1145/3589610.3596281(64-75)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3589610.3596281
Ahmad ANoor ASharif HHameed UAsif SAnwar MGehani AZaffar FSiddiqui J(2022)Trimmer: An Automated System for Configuration-Based Software DebloatingIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2021.309571648:9(3485-3505)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2021.3095716
Bartell SDietz WAdve V(2020)Guided linking: dynamic linking without the costsProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/34282134:OOPSLA(1-29)Online publication date: 13-Nov-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3428213

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