In this blog post we will briefly describe today's release, provide an overview of the components of rev.ng and introduce you the next steps the rev.ng project intends to take towards the 1.0 release.

We are inviting small groups of people to get access to nightly builds. If you already registered, be patient and monitor our Twitter account. Otherwise, register now.

Nightly builds release

Today, we start releasing nightly builds of all the rev.ng components including revng (binary lifter and translator), revng-c (the decompiler) and cold-revng (the user interface).

rev.ng is an ambitious project which took the long route in several aspects. We think this will prove to be a winning strategy to build an innovative product.

We're now starting to see the end of the tunnel that leads us to become a mature tool for binary analysis, but we're not there yet. Nightly builds are our way to invite you to join us along the last mile of the journey.

What to expect

rev.ng can currently handle binaries compiled for Linux targeting x86-64, i386, ARM, AArch64, MIPS and SystemZ. Here's a few things you can do with the current release.

1. Try out the UI using test files

The package we distribute includes a set of pre-lifted files. You can open them in the UI right away.

EXAMPLES=root/share/revng/qa/tests/runtime/x86_64/abi-enforced-for-decompilation
./revng ui $EXAMPLES/calc.bc

In this blogpost, we show how libFuzzer, the LLVM fuzz testing library part, can be employed with rev.ng in order to perform coverage-guided blackbox fuzzing of executable binaries. We also show that our approach is fast, semantic-preserving and simply requires to implement the harness function, as occurs for programs with source code available.

Note that this work is based on the rev.ng lifter, the open-source component at the core of the decompiler we're building. The publicly available version is a bit outdated, but we are in the process of pushing out new versions on a more regular basis. Stay tuned.