Reimagining Disassembly Interfaces with Visualization: Combining Instruction Tracing and Control Flow with DisViz

2025-10-21

AI Summary

Binary disassembly analysis suffers from ambiguous source-to-instruction mapping and difficulty in jointly preserving execution order and control flow. To address this, we propose DisViz—a performance-analysis-oriented, interactive disassembly visualization tool. Its core contributions are threefold: (1) a basic-block–based instruction layout that explicitly preserves execution order while intuitively revealing control structures (e.g., loops); (2) block-level minimaps to enhance contextual awareness and navigation in large-scale disassembly; and (3) integrated instruction tracing, control-flow graph visualization, and dynamic source-code correlation, enabling bidirectional, web-based navigation between source and disassembly. An empirical evaluation with ten domain experts from diverse institutions demonstrates that DisViz significantly improves both accuracy in identifying compiler optimization behaviors and overall analysis efficiency—validating its effectiveness for understanding compilation transformations and their performance implications.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Data Visualization & Summarization
• Search and Optimization: Distributed Search
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Distributed CSP/Optimization

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data visualization
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs
• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance

Abstract

In applications where efficiency is critical, developers may examine their compiled binaries, seeking to understand how the compiler transformed their source code and what performance implications that transformation may have. This analysis is challenging due to the vast number of disassembled binary instructions and the many-to-many mappings between them and the source code. These problems are exacerbated as source code size increases, giving the compiler more freedom to map and disperse binary instructions across the disassembly space. Interfaces for disassembly typically display instructions as an unstructured listing or sacrifice the order of execution. We design a new visual interface for disassembly code that combines execution order with control flow structure, enabling analysts to both trace through code and identify familiar aspects of the computation. Central to our approach is a novel layout of instructions grouped into basic blocks that displays a looping structure in an intuitive way. We add to this disassembly representation a unique block-based mini-map that leverages our layout and shows context across thousands of disassembly instructions. Finally, we embed our disassembly visualization in a web-based tool, DisViz, which adds dynamic linking with source code across the entire application. DizViz was developed in collaboration with program analysis experts following design study methodology and was validated through evaluation sessions with ten participants from four institutions. Participants successfully completed the evaluation tasks, hypothesized about compiler optimizations, and noted the utility of our new disassembly view. Our evaluation suggests that our new integrated view helps application developers in understanding and navigating disassembly code.

Problem

• Visualizing disassembly code with execution order and control flow
• Addressing challenges in mapping binary instructions to source code
• Improving developer comprehension of compiler optimizations in binaries

Innovation

• Visual interface combines execution order with control flow
• Novel layout groups instructions into intuitive looping blocks
• Web tool embeds visualization with dynamic source linking