When you think of a decompiler or binary lifter, do you think of it as a static analyzer? In this talk I’ll explain why you should, at least in highly-challenging setups. Specifically, context-sensitive static analysis has been the basis for the most advanced decompiler of Ethereum VM smart contracts. We will see why decompilation can really be a “what will the program do for all inputs?” question and what bizarre forms of static analysis can help us with the problem.

Yannis Smaragdakis is a Professor at the University of Athens. He has worked on whatever he thought was cool, for the past 30 years. Among others: static analysis algorithms (expressed declaratively, in Datalog), generics and meta-programming, and systems (virtual memory, multithreading). He has received an NSF Career award, European Research Council (ERC) Advanced and Consolidator grants, and “best paper”’ awards at OOPSLA’18, ECOOP’18, ISSTA’12, ASE’07, ISSTA’06, GPCE’04, and USENIX’99. He co-founded Dedaub, a leading company for smart contract security.

Research Interests: programming languages and software engineering

• Program analysis (static analysis, test generation, invariant inference, symbolic execution)
• Language mechanisms for abstraction (declarative languages, program generation, DSLs, modules and components, generics, extensible languages, multi-paradigm programming)
• Languages and tools for systems (programming models for concurrency, language support for distributed computing, memory management and program locality)