Improved Algorithm for the Network Alignment Problem with Application to Binary Diffing

TL;DR

This paper introduces a faster, more convergent algorithm for the Network Alignment problem, demonstrating superior performance and applying it to Binary Diffing to improve binary comparison accuracy.

Contribution

A novel, efficient algorithm for Network Alignment inspired by message passing, with demonstrated improvements over existing methods and application to Binary Diffing.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art solvers in experiments

Provides better binary matching than reference methods

Highlights the importance of graphical structure in binary analysis

Abstract

In this paper, we present a novel algorithm to address the Network Alignment problem. It is inspired from a previous message passing framework of Bayati et al. [2] and includes several modifications designed to significantly speed up the message updates as well as to enforce their convergence. Experiments show that our proposed model outperforms other state-of-the-art solvers. Finally, we propose an application of our method in order to address the Binary Diffing problem. We show that our solution provides better assignment than the reference differs in almost all submitted instances and outline the importance of leveraging the graphical structure of binary programs.