CiRCLE: Recovering Complex Data Structures in Binaries Beyond Fragmentation
Zeyu Gao, Junlin Zhou, Songtao Yang, Chao Zhang
Abstract
Decompilation of stripped binaries is hindered by the loss of user-defined data structures, causing pseudocode to degrade into raw offsets, casts, and generic pointers. Recovering these structures remains challenging for three main reasons: local evidence becomes fragmented once accesses go beyond simple one-hop forms, program-wide aggregation fragments under polymorphism, and residual cases such as dynamic offsets or irreconcilable conflicts are not reliably resolvable by static rules alone. We present CiRCLE, a staged framework for recovering complex data structures from stripped binaries. CiRCLE first constructs the MOSAIC graph, a shared evidence representation that explicitly preserves computed and intermediate pointer expressions at expression granularity. It then performs conflict-aware interprocedural aggregation directly on the same evidence graph, enabling evidence reuse across monomorphic flows while isolating true polymorphic boundaries. For the small residue of underdetermined cases, it invokes LLM refinement only on localized evidence packages and falls back to the deterministic static result when refinement fails. On the OSPREY dataset, CiRCLE surpasses the best prior method by up to 15.6 % in Structure Identification, 47.7 % in Relationship Recovery, and 33.6 % in Layout Recovery. On a corpus of 140,000 functions from real-world applications, it achieves in Layout Recovery, a 51.1 % relative improvement over the best prior method in that setting.
Ask about this paper
Ask your agent about it.
Lune has read the top-tier papers around this one, so every answer names the papers it rests on.
Your agent calls
Lunesearch_papers
Free to start. No credit card required.
Terminal
Install the CLIlune papers get ea331e0f-a4df-4401-adad-ac5d73eea336Related papers
- TypeForge: Synthesizing and Selecting Best-Fit Composite Data Types for Stripped BinariesYanzhong Wang, Ruigang Liang, Yilin Li, Peiwei Hu et al.S&P 2025
- OSPREY: Recovery of Variable and Data Structure via Probabilistic Analysis for Stripped BinaryZhuo Zhang, Yapeng Ye, Wei You, Guanhong Tao et al.S&P 2021 · 78 citations
- RecStruct: Recovering Nested Struct Types from Stripped Binaries via Stack-Driven UnificationYuxin Chen, Zhiyang Fang, Shiyi Wu, Yixin Xu et al.USENIX Security 2026
- From Similarity Ranking to Definitive Verdict: LLM-Enhanced Source-to-Binary Function LocalizationJingyi Shi, Chengyue Liu, Zhengzi Xu, Yang Xiao et al.OOPSLA 2026
- Lifting Optimized Binaries to Canonical Compiler IR via Structure-Aware Retrieval and Iterative VerificationXiaoao Zhu, Jie Ren, Zhiqiang Li, Jie Zheng et al.ACL 2026
