Computer Science

Computer Science ›› 2025, Vol. 52 ›› Issue (6): 365-380.doi: 10.11896/jsjkx.240400003

• Information Security • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Survey of Binary Code Similarity Detection Method

WEI Youyuan1, SONG Jianhua1,3,4, ZHANG Yan2,3   

  1. 1 School of Cyber Science and Technology,Hubei University,Wuhan 430062,China
    2 School of Computer Science andInformation Engineering,Hubei University,Wuhan 430062,China
    3 Key Laboratory of Intelligent Sensing System and Security(Hubei University),Ministry of Education,Wuhan 430062,China
    4 Hubei Provincial Engineering Research Center of Intelligent Connected Vehicle Network Security,Wuhan 430062,China
  • Received:2024-04-01 Revised:2024-10-03 Online:2025-06-15 Published:2025-06-11
  • About author:WEI Youyuan,born in 2000,postgraduate,is a member of CCF(No.T7853G).His main research interests include binary code similarity detection,malicious code identification and so on.
    SONG Jianhua,born in 1973,Ph.D,professor,postgraduate supervisor,is a member of CCF(No.27785M).Her main research interests include network and information security and so on.
  • Supported by:
    National Natural Science Foundation of China(62377009),Major Program(JD) of Hubei Province(2023BAA018),Key R&D program of Hubei Province(2021BAA184,2021BAA188) and Hubei Province Project of Key Research Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences at Universities(Research Center of Information Management for Performance Evaluation)(2020JX01).

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Abstract: Code similarity detection can be divided into two types according to the research object:source code similarity detection and binary code similarity detection,which are commonly used in scenarios such as malicious code identification,vulnerability search,and copyright protection.Based on the current domestic Internet environment,programs are usually released in the form of binary files,and most programs cannot directly obtain source code.Therefore,in related research in the field of software security,the application scope of binary code similarity detection is relatively wider.Starting from the definition and implementation process of binary code similarity detection,according to the code representation form,it is divided into three categories:text cha-racter-based,code embedding-based,and graph embedding-based.The classic binary code similarity detection methods and the recent five years of research and development are compared.A total of 19 documents on new methods are sorted out,and various methods are analyzed and summarized based on multi-architecture,Baseline,benchmark datasets and detection performance.Finally,current problems and possible future research directions are analyzed based on the development of new methods.

Key words: Binary code similarity detection, Code representation, Software security, Malicious code identification, Vulnerability search

CLC Number: 

  • TP311.5
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