Multi-Lingual Components for Reverse Engineering

The proposal presents a plan for creating a set of high-quality, language-independent, reusable components for extracting and operating on a program's semantic structure. Theses components will enable sophisticated and accurate analysis because semantic structures come much closer than syntactic structures to encapsulating the real intent of the original designers. The components will be appropriate for analyzing and reconstructing large programs and will be applicable across a wide range of reverse-engineering activities. The starting point for this project is DARPA-funded university research now ripe for transition from laboratory to industry. The proposed components will be a key enabling technology of immense benefit to any company wishing to produce reverse engineering tools, or enhance the capabilities of program development environments. They will be able to create multi-lingual, scalable tools with much less effort than would otherwise be required.