CEBin: A Cost-Effective Framework for Large-Scale Binary Code Similarity Detection
Hao Wang, Zeyu Gao, Chao Zhang, Mingyang Sun, Yuchen Zhou, Han Qiu, Xi Xiao
Abstract
Binary code similarity detection (BCSD) is a fundamental technique for various application. Many BCSD solutions have been proposed recently, which mostly are embedding-based, but have shown limited accuracy and efficiency especially when the volume of target binaries to search is large. To address this issue, we propose a cost-effective BCSD framework, CEBin, which fuses embeddingbased and comparison-based approaches to significantly improve accuracy while minimizing overheads. Specifically, CEBin utilizes a refined embedding-based approach to extract features of target code, which efficiently narrows down the scope of candidate similar code and boosts performance. Then, it utilizes a comparison-based approach that performs a pairwise comparison on the candidates to capture more nuanced and complex relationships, which greatly improves the accuracy of similarity detection. By bridging the gap between embedding-based and comparison-based approaches, CEBin is able to provide an effective and efficient solution for detecting similar code (including vulnerable ones) in large-scale software ecosystems. Experimental results on three well-known datasets demonstrate the superiority of CEBin over existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines. To further evaluate the usefulness of BCSD in real world, we construct a large-scale benchmark of vulnerability, offering the first precise evaluation scheme to assess BCSD methods for the 1-day vulnerability detection task. CEBin could identify the similar function from millions of candidate functions in just a few seconds and achieves an impressive recall rate of 85.46% on this more practical but challenging task, which are several order of magnitudes faster and 4.07× better than the best SOTA baseline. Our code is available at https://github.com/Hustcw/CEBin . CCS CONCEPTS • Security and privacy → Software reverse engineering; • Computing methodologies → Machine learning.
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Cited by top-tier papers13
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- Lares: LLM-driven Code Slice Semantic Search for Patch Presence TestingSiyuan Li, Yaowen Zheng, Hong Li, Jingdong Guo et al.ASE 2025 · 1 citation
Builds on13
- Neural Network-based Graph Embedding for Cross-Platform Binary Code Similarity DetectionXiaojun Xu, Chang Liu, Qian Feng, Heng Yin et al.CCS 2017 · 682 citations
- Scalable Graph-based Bug Search for Firmware ImagesQian Feng, Rundong Zhou, Chengcheng Xu, Yao Cheng et al.CCS 2016 · 456 citations
- Asm2Vec: Boosting Static Representation Robustness for Binary Clone Search against Code Obfuscation and Compiler OptimizationSteven H. H. Ding, Benjamin C. M. Fung, Philippe CharlandS&P 2019 · 447 citations
- discovRE: Efficient Cross-Architecture Identification of Bugs in Binary CodeSebastian Eschweiler, Khaled Yakdan, Elmar Gerhards-PadillaNDSS 2016 · 342 citations
- Order Matters: Semantic-Aware Neural Networks for Binary Code Similarity DetectionZeping Yu, Rui Cao, Qiyi Tang, Sen Nie et al.AAAI 2020 · 265 citations
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