Razor: A framework for post-deployment software debloating

Abstract

Commodity software typically includes a large number of functionalities for a broad user population. However, each individual user usually only needs a small subset of all supported functionalities. The bloated code not only hinders optimal execution, but also leads to a larger attack surface. Recent works have explored program debloating as an emerging solution to this problem. Unfortunately, these works require program source code, limiting their real-world deployability. In this paper, we propose a practical debloating framework, RAZOR, that performs code reduction for deployed binaries. Based on users' specifications, our tool customizes the binary to generate a functional program with minimal code size. Instead of only supporting given test cases, RAZOR takes several control-flow heuristics to infer complementary code that is necessary to support user-expected functionalities. We evaluated RAZOR on commonly used benchmarks and real-world applications, including the web browser FireFox and the close-sourced PDF reader FoxitReader. The result shows that RAZOR is able to reduce over 70% of the code from the bloated binary. It produces functional programs and does not introduce any security issues. RAZOR is thus a practical framework for debloating real-world programs.