Tim Alberdingk Thijm

Summary: During a Springternship at Trail of Bits, Tim Alberdingk Thijm created data-flow-based optimizations that eliminate most dead stores emulating writes to machine code registers in McSema-lifted programs. Applying his dead-store-elimination passes to Apache httpd eliminated 117,059 stores, or 50% of store operations to Remill's registers.
What's compelling: Half of the register-store operations in a lifted Apache httpd binary were dead weight, which is the kind of overhead that compounds across every binary a lifting pipeline touches.

Read the original at Trail of Bits Blog ↗