June 24, 2008
Paul Anderson in Embedded Intel Solutions
"Analyze x86 Executables to Improve Software Quality" by Paul Anderson was published today in Embedded Intel Solutions. An excerpt appears below, with a link to the full article.
Analyze x86 Executables to Improve Software Quality
By Paul Anderson
[...]
The disadvantage of source-only analyses is that it's very rare that all of the source code for an application is available. Almost all applications link with third-party libraries including operating- system libraries. A source-code analysis tool is blind to any non-source components.[...] Even in cases where the source code is available, it's helpful to analyze the object code instead. After all, computers don't execute source code. They execute machine code. There may be subtle yet important differences between the apparent semantics of source code and the semantics of the machine code to which it's compiled. This is known as the What You See Is Not What You eXecute (WYSINWYX) effect [1].
[...]
See the article on the Embedded Intel Solutions website
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