Deterministic Fully-Static Whole-Binary Translation Without Heuristics

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security arXiv:2605.08419 (cs) [Submitted on 8 May 2026] Title:Deterministic Fully-Static Whole-Binary Translation without Heuristics Authors:Hongyu Chen, James McGowan, Michael Franz View a PDF of the paper titled Deterministic Fully-Static Whole-Binary Translation without Heuristics, by Hongyu Chen and 2 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental)

Abstract:We present Elevator, the first binary translator that statically translates entire x86-64 executables to AArch64 without debug information, source code, or assumptions about code layout. Unlike existing systems, which rely on heuristics or runtime fallbacks to handle code-versus-data decoding errors, Elevator considers all possible interpretations of every byte and produces a separate translation for each feasible one ahead of time. Any byte may be interpreted as data, an opcode, or an opcode argument; we generate separate control flow paths for all interpretations, pruning only those leading to abnormal termination.
Translations are built by composing code "tiles" automatically derived from a high-level description of the source ISA, yielding a nimble translation framework. The approach is deterministic and produces complete, self-contained binaries with no runtime component in the trusted code base. The principal cost is substantial code size expansion. The key benefit is that the output is the actual code that will run, enabling testing, validation, certification, and cryptographic signing prior to deployment, reducing risk compared to emulators or JIT compilers.
We evaluate Elevator on a diverse corpus of real-world binaries, including the entire SPECint 2006 suite, demonstrating that static full-program binary translation can be both reliable and practical. Elevator achieves performance on par with or better than QEMU's user-mode JIT emulation.

Subjects:	Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Programming Languages (cs.PL)
Cite as:	arXiv:2605.08419 [cs.CR]
	(or arXiv:2605.08419v1 [cs.CR] for this version)
	https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.08419 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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From: Hongyu Chen [view email]
[v1] Fri, 8 May 2026 19:25:06 UTC (332 KB)
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