Exposing Hidden Interfaces: LLM-Guided Type Inference for Reverse Engineering macOS Private Frameworks
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Abstract (arXiv)
Private macOS frameworks underpin critical services and daemons but remain undocumented and distributed only as stripped binaries, complicating security analysis. We present MOTIF, an agentic framework that integrates tool-augmented analysis with a finetuned large language model specialized for Objective-C type inference. The agent manages runtime metadata extraction, binary inspection, and constraint checking, while the model generates candidate method signatures that are validated and refined into compilable headers. On MOTIF-Bench, a benchmark built from public frameworks with groundtruth headers, MOTIF improves signature recovery from 15% to 86% compared to baseline static analysis tooling, with consistent gains in tool-use correctness and inference stability. Case studies on private frameworks show that reconstructed headers compile, link, and facilitate downstream security research and vulnerability studies. By transforming opaque binaries into analyzable interfaces, MOTIF establishes a scalable foundation for systematic auditing of macOS internals.
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References · 8
- 2022Emergent Abilities of Large Language Modelscited by 2,483
- 2024LLM4Decompile: Decompiling Binary Code with Large Language Modelscited by 38
- 2023Harnessing the Power of LLM to Support Binary Taint Analysiscited by 13
- 2015When Coding Style Survives Compilation: De-anonymizing Programmers from Executable Binariescited by 11
- 2024How Far Have We Gone in Binary Code Understanding Using Large Language Modelscited by 7
- 2024Exploring the Efficacy of Large Language Models (GPT-4) in Binary Reverse Engineeringcited by 7
- 2016Polymorphic Type Inference for Machine Codecited by 5
- 2024BinSub: The Simple Essence of Polymorphic Type Inference for Machine Codecited by 2
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