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adds forward-chaining rules and Primus Lisp methods #1363

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@ivg ivg commented Nov 16, 2021

This pull request enables forward-chaining rules in the knowledge base and uses them to implement Primus Lisp methods. In addition, it adds a few goodies that makes it easier to write Primus Lisp semantics primitives. It also tweaks a little bit the Primus Lisp parser to enable proper handling of keywords.

Forward Chaining Rules

So far, the knowledge base was only supporting backward-chaining via the promise operation, i.e., promises were called lazily only when a property was collected, which triggered the chain of property computations. Now it is possible to push knowledge forward using the dual of promise, the observe operation. The observe operation registers a push action for a property p, and the knowledge base calls push x v when the value of property p of an object x is changed (refined) to v. The push action may change properties of other slots or perform arbitrary knowledge base computations. Not only it enables a more straightforward implementation of some knowledge base rules, but it also enables general event-driven knowledge base analysis. For example, we can use forward-chaining rules to unify Primus Lisp dynamic analyses that use the incident system with static analysis by introducing the incident property and storing detected incidents directly in the knowledge base.

Primus Lisp Methods

The important application of the forward-chaining rules is the implementation of the Primus Lisp semantic methods. Much like their dynamic counterparts that map Primus observations to signals, the semantic methods map Knowledge Base observations to signals so that now we can write a Primus Lisp method that will be called every time some property of a program object is changed. This feature will be heavily used in the next pull request that introduces byte-driven pattern matching, but the potential is much higher than that. We can finally write nearly arbitrary static analysis directly in Primus Lisp by reflecting various properties into signals.

Primitive Writers Goodies

This PR also brings some number of quality of life improvements in the form of small helpers that make the life of a primitive writer much easier. We now have Primus.Lisp.Semantics.Value and Primus.Lisp.Semantics.Effect class that facilitate the creation of values and effects that the primitives consume and produce. The Primus Lisp Semantic Interpreter was also tweaked to better support symbols and keywords. In particular, a primitive now can return a symbol and the interpreter will take care of interning it. Finally, the kewords are now treated the same as in other lisp dialects, they self-evaluate to their symbols, so we no longer need to write ':foo and instead can write :foo. This change is applied on the reader (parser) level, so it will affect the dynamic interpreter as well.

ivg added 6 commits November 16, 2021 11:10
The keyword symbols, like `:foo` were treated as variables, but we
want them to be symbols. The change is made on the reader (parser)
level so it will affect both Primus Lisp implementations - static
and dynamic.
When a primitive returns a value that has the symbol slot set to
something, the interpreter will automatically intern it. It simplifies
writing the primitives as the implementor doesn't need to bother about
interning and setting the static part of the value.
@ivg ivg merged commit 72066bb into BinaryAnalysisPlatform:master Nov 16, 2021
ivg added a commit to ivg/opam-repository that referenced this pull request Dec 8, 2021
This release brings This release brings Ghidra as the new disassembler
and lifting backend, significantly improves our Thumb
lifter (especially with respect to interworking), adds
forward-chainging rules and context variables to the knowledge base,
support for LLVM 12, a pass that flattens IR, and a new framework for
pattern matching on bytes that leverages the available patterns and
actions from the Ghidra project.

It also contains many bug fixes and improvements, most notable
performance improvements that make bap from 30 to 50 per cent
faster. See below for the full list of changes.

Package-wise, we split bap into three parts: `bap-core`, `bap`, and
`bap-extra`. The `bap-core` metapackage contains the minimal set of
core packages that is necessary to disassemble the binary, the `bap`
package extends this set with various analysis, finally, `bap-extra`
includes rarely used or hard to install packages, such as the symbolic
executor, which is very heavy on installation, and `bap-ghidra`, which
is right now in a very experimental stage and is only installable on
Ubuntu 18.04, since it requires the libghidra-dev package available
from ppa,

```
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ivg/ghidra -y
sudo apt-get install libghidra-dev -y
sudo apt-get install libghidra-data -y
```

Changelog
=========

Features
--------

- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1325 adds armeb abi
- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1326 adds experimental Ghidra disassembler and lifting backend
- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1332 adds the flatten pass
- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1341 adds context variables to the knowledge base
- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1343 adds register aliases to the Core Theory
- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1358 adds LLVM 12 support
- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1360 extends the knowledge monad interface
- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1363 adds forward-chaining rules and Primus Lisp methods
- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1364 adds a generic byte pattern matcher based on Ghidra
- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1365 adds support for the Thumb IT blocks
- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1369 adds some missing `t2LDR.-i12` instructions to the Thumb lifter

Improvements
------------

- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1336 improves the `main` function discovery heuristics
- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1337 adds more Primus Lisp stubs and fixes some existing
- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1342 uses context variables to store the current theory
- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1344 uses the context variables to store the Primus Lisp state
- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1355 tweaks symbolization and function start identification facilities
- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1353 improves arm-family support
- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1356 stops proposing aliases as potential subroutine names
- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1361 rewrites knowledge and primus monads
- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1370 tweaks Primus Lisp' method resolution to keep super methods
- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1375 error handling and performance tweaks
- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1378 improves reification of calls in the IR theory (part I)
- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1379 improves semantics of some ITT instructions
- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1380 Fixes handling of fallthroughs in IR theory

Bug Fixes
---------

- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1328 fixes C.ABI.Args `popn` and `align_even` operators
- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1329 fixes frame layout calculation in the Primus loader
- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1330 fixes the address size computation in the llvm backend
- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1333 fixes and improves label handling in the IR theor
- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1338 fixes core:eff theory
- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1340 fixes the Node.update for graphs with unlabeled nodes
- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1347 fixes a knowledge base race condition in the run plugin
- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1348 fixes endianness in the raw loader
- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1349 short-circuits evaluation of terms in Bap_main.init
- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1350 fixes variable rewriter and some Primus Lisp symbolic functions
- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1351 fixes and improves aarch64 lifter
- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1352 fixes several Primus Lisp stubs
- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1357 fixes some T32 instructions that are accessing to PC
- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1359 fixes handling of let-bound variables in flatten pass
- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1366 fixes a bug in the `cmp` semantics
- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1374 fixes handling modified immediate constants in ARM T32 encoding
- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1376 fixes fresh variable generation
- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1377 fixes the IR theory implementation

Tooling
-------

- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1319 fixes the shared folder in deb packages
- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1320 removes sudo from postinst and postrm actions in the deb packages
- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1321 enables push flag in the publish-docker-image action
- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1323 fixes the ppx_bap version in the dev-repo opam file
- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1331 fixes the docker publisher, also enables manual triggering
- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1327 fixes a typo in the ubuntu dockerfiles
- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1345 fixes bapdoc
- BinaryAnalysisPlatform/bap#1346 nightly tests are failing due to a bug upstream
@ivg ivg deleted the forward-chaining-and-primus-methods branch March 9, 2022 17:20
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