Learning Binary Representation for Automatic Patch Detection

Binary-only bug search has already drawn a lot attentions recently, due to the increasing growth of security breaches. Most of existing work focuses on searching by checking the similarity of code snippets. It is further required to check whether the function is patched or not. Unfortunately, this is still a manual effort for all existing code search based approaches. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for automatic patch detection. we build a patch detector by learning the feature representation from the patched code in the binary format. We utilize the feature encoding technique to make the binary code trainable, and build our neural network model to learn the patch feature for increasing detection accuracy. We have implemented a prototype called PATCHDETECTOR, and systematically evaluated its performance in terms of the accuracy and efficiency by using 1,600 OpenSSL binaries of 216,000 functions. Experimental results have shown that PATCHDETECTOR can effectively detect whether the target binary function is patched or not with the detection accuracy of 92% on average.