BinTrimmer: Towards Static Binary Debloating Through Abstract Interpretation

The increasing complexity of modern programs motivates software engineers to often rely on the support of third-party libraries. Although this practice allows application developers to achieve a compelling time-to-market, it often makes the final product bloated with conspicuous chunks of unused code. Other than making a program unnecessarily large, this dormant code could be leveraged by willful attackers to harm users. As a consequence, several techniques have been recently proposed to perform program debloating and remove (or secure) dead code from applications. However, state-of-the-art approaches are either based on unsound strategies, thus producing unreliable results, or pose too strict assumptions on the program itself.