Reimagining Disassembly Interfaces with Visualization: Combining Instruction Tracing and Control Flow with DisViz

TL;DR

This paper introduces DisViz, a novel visualization tool that combines execution order, control flow, and source code linking to improve disassembly analysis for performance-critical applications.

Contribution

It presents a new visual interface for disassembly that groups instructions into basic blocks with a looping layout and includes a mini-map, enhancing understanding and navigation of binary code.

Findings

Participants successfully completed analysis tasks using DisViz.

The visualization helped users hypothesize about compiler optimizations.

Users found the integrated disassembly view useful for understanding code.

Abstract

In applications where efficiency is critical, developers may examine their compiled binaries, seeking to understand how the compiler transformed their source code and what performance implications that transformation may have. This analysis is challenging due to the vast number of disassembled binary instructions and the many-to-many mappings between them and the source code. These problems are exacerbated as source code size increases, giving the compiler more freedom to map and disperse binary instructions across the disassembly space. Interfaces for disassembly typically display instructions as an unstructured listing or sacrifice the order of execution. We design a new visual interface for disassembly code that combines execution order with control flow structure, enabling analysts to both trace through code and identify familiar aspects of the computation. Central to our approach is a novel layout of instructions grouped into basic blocks that displays a looping structure in an intuitive way. We add to this disassembly representation a unique block-based mini-map that leverages our layout and shows context across thousands of disassembly instructions. Finally, we embed our disassembly visualization in a web-based tool, DisViz, which adds dynamic linking with source code across the entire application. DizViz was developed in collaboration with program analysis experts following design study methodology and was validated through evaluation sessions with ten participants from four institutions. Participants successfully completed the evaluation tasks, hypothesized about compiler optimizations, and noted the utility of our new disassembly view. Our evaluation suggests that our new integrated view helps application developers in understanding and navigating disassembly code.