Suggesting meaningful variable names for decompiled code: a machine translation approach

ABSTRACT

Decompiled code lacks meaningful variable names. We used statistical machine translation to suggest variable names that are natural given the context. This technique has previously been successfully applied to obfuscated JavaScript code, but decompiled C code poses unique challenges in constructing an aligned corpus and selecting the best translation from among several candidates.

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Index Terms

• Software and its engineering

  • Software creation and management

    • Software post-development issues

      • Software reverse engineering