Deterministic Fully-Static Whole-Binary Translation without Heuristics

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 8 May 2026] Deterministic Fully-Static Whole-Binary Translation without Heuristics Hongyu Chen, James McGowan, Michael Franz We present Elevator, the first binary translator that statically translates entire x86-64 executables to AArch64 without debug information, source code, or assumptions about code layout. Unlike existing systems, which rely on heuristics or runtime fallbacks to handle code-versus-data decoding errors, Elevator considers all possible interpretations of every byte and produces a separate translation for each feasible one ahead of time. Any byte may be interpreted as data, an opcode, or an opcode argument; we generate separate control flow paths for all interpretations, pruning only those leading to abnormal termination. Translations are built by composing code "tiles" automatically derived from a high-level description of the source ISA, yielding a nimble translation framework. The approach is deterministic and produces complete, self-contained binaries with no runtime component in the trusted code base. The principal cost is substantial code size expansion. The key benefit is that the output is the actual code that will run, enabling testing, validation, certification, and cryptographic signing prior to deployment, reducing risk compared to emulators or JIT compilers. We evaluate Elevator on a diverse corpus of real-world binaries, including the entire SPECint 2006 suite, demonstrating that static full-program binary translation can be both reliable and practical. Elevator achieves performance on par with or better than QEMU's user-mode JIT emulation. Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Programming Languages (cs.PL) Cite as: arXiv:2605.08419 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2605.08419v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.08419 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Hongyu Chen [view email] [v1] Fri, 8 May 2026 19:25:06 UTC (332 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-05 Change to browse by: cs cs.PL References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)