Exploiting Binary Semantics: Enhancing Function Name Inference in Stripped Binaries via LLMs

Function name inference in stripped binaries is a crucial task that supports various security applications, including vulnerability detection and malware analysis. Existing methods suffer from limited model capacity and insufficient exploitation of function semantics, which constrains their ability to comprehend binary code and leads to poor generalization on unseen binaries. To address these problems, we propose BinLLM, a novel framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to exploit the semantic potential of binary code, thereby enhancing function name inference. Specially, BinLLM integrates three key innovations: (1) source code semantics-guided function name refinement, which mitigates the negative effects of low-quality semantic identifiers during training; (2) A context-aware data collection algorithm that seeks richer semantic dependencies to improve model training and inference performance; (3) parameter-efficient fine-tuning on a domain-specific dataset enriched with semantic knowledge to enhance the model's understanding of binary semantics. These components collectively enhance the model's performance in function name inference on unseen binaries. We evaluate BinLLM on a large-scale dataset comprising$2,864,719$functions across four architectures (x86-64, x86-32, ARM, MIPS) and four optimization levels ($\mathrm{O} 0-\mathrm{O} 3$). Experimental results show that BinLLM achieves substantial improvements over state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, with relative gains of$320.1 \%, 274.8 \%$, and 297.6 % in precision, recall, and F1-score. Ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of each component in enhancing overall performance.