Towards Better CFG Layouts

Reverse engineering of software is used to analyze the behavior of malicious programs, find vulnerabilities in software, or design interoperability solutions.Although this activity largely relies on dedicated software toolbox, it is still largely manual.In order to facilitate these tasks, many tools provide analysts with an interface to visualize Control Flow Graph (CFG) of a function.Properly laying out the CFG is therefore extremely important to facilitate manual reverse engineering.However, CFGs are often laid out with general algorithms rather than domain-specific ones.This leads to subpar graph layouts.In this paper, we provide a comprehensive state-of-the-art for CFG layout techniques.We propose a modified layout algorithm that showcases the patterns analysts are looking for.Finally, we compare layouts offered by popular binary analysis frameworks with our own.