About Experimental Evaluation

[peicwang]

Hi, I noticed that you mentioned in your paper that the padding instructions will not count towards positive or negative instructions. I think it's very reasonable, but how to automate this task, specifically, how to accurately identify whether certain instructions are padding instructions?

[Nifury]

According to our observations, MSVC tends to use INT3 as padding whereas gcc uses NOP instructions (one-byte or multi-byte).

INT3 and NOP instructions in the ground truth are considered padding instructions.

[peicwang]

So, based on your observations, in order to remove INT3 or NOP instructions from the ground truth, it may only require a simple scan or some more complex algorithms? And do you need to pay attention to the position of these padding instructions? What I mean is that the padding instructions that exist at the end of the function are removed, while those that exist within the function are preserved?

[Nifury]

it may only require a simple scan or some more complex algorithms

A simple scan. You can easily tell if an instruction is a padding instruction via its mnemonics.

It doesn't matter where the padding instructions are. All of them are masked during evaluation.

[peicwang]

Thank you for your reply, I see