{"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/towards-optimal-use-of-exception-handling","title":"Towards Optimal Use of Exception Handling Information for Function Detection","arxiv_id":"2104.03168","date":"2021-04-07","proceeding":null,"authors":["Chengbin Pang","Ruotong Yu","Dongpeng Xu","Eric Koskinen","Georgios Portokalidis","Jun Xu"],"abstract":"Function entry detection is critical for security of binary code. Conventional methods heavily rely on patterns, inevitably missing true functions and introducing errors. Recently, call frames have been used in exception-handling for function start detection. However, existing methods have two problems. First, they combine call frames with heuristic-based approaches, which often brings error and uncertain benefits. Second, they trust the fidelity of call frames, without handling the errors that are introduced by call frames. In this paper, we first study the coverage and accuracy of existing approaches in detecting function starts using call frames. We found that recursive disassembly with call frames can maximize coverage, and using extra heuristic-based approaches does not improve coverage and actually hurts accuracy. Second, we unveil call-frame errors and develop the first approach to fix them, making their use more reliable.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.03168v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.03168v1.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":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"towards-optimal-use-of-exception-handling","repo_url":"https://github.com/ruotongyu/FETCH","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}