{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/is-function-similarity-over-engineered","title":"Is Function Similarity Over-Engineered? Building a Benchmark","arxiv_id":"2410.22677","date":"2024-10-30","proceeding":null,"authors":["Rebecca Saul","Chang Liu","Noah Fleischmann","Richard Zak","Kristopher Micinski","Edward Raff","James Holt"],"abstract":"Binary analysis is a core component of many critical security tasks, including reverse engineering, malware analysis, and vulnerability detection. Manual analysis is often time-consuming, but identifying commonly-used or previously-seen functions can reduce the time it takes to understand a new file. However, given the complexity of assembly, and the NP-hard nature of determining function equivalence, this task is extremely difficult. Common approaches often use sophisticated disassembly and decompilation tools, graph analysis, and other expensive pre-processing steps to perform function similarity searches over some corpus. In this work, we identify a number of discrepancies between the current research environment and the underlying application need. To remedy this, we build a new benchmark, REFuSE-Bench, for binary function similarity detection consisting of high-quality datasets and tests that better reflect real-world use cases. In doing so, we address issues like data duplication and accurate labeling, experiment with real malware, and perform the first serious evaluation of ML binary function similarity models on Windows data. Our benchmark reveals that a new, simple basline, one which looks at only the raw bytes of a function, and requires no disassembly or other pre-processing, is able to achieve state-of-the-art performance in multiple settings. Our findings challenge conventional assumptions that complex models with highly-engineered features are being used to their full potential, and demonstrate that simpler approaches can provide significant value.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.22677v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.22677v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"is-function-similarity-over-engineered","repo_url":"https://github.com/FutureComputing4AI/Reverse-Engineering-Function-Search","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"jax","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"malware-analysis","task_name":"Malware Analysis"},{"task_slug":"vulnerability-detection","task_name":"Vulnerability Detection"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2410.22677","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2410.22677"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/FutureComputing4AI/Reverse-Engineering-Function-Search","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran_honours":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"ac8c062718c066e0","entry":"analysis","repo":"FutureComputing4AI/Reverse-Engineering-Function-Search","repo_kind":"official","path":"data-processing/bsim/src/MRR.py","file_url":"https://github.com/FutureComputing4AI/Reverse-Engineering-Function-Search/blob/HEAD/data-processing/bsim/src/MRR.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_honours","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"HONOURS","metamorphic_tier":"well_formed","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"ac8c062718c066e0"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}