Alternative backends to DynamoRIO?

[Manouchehri]

First of all, great job on rgat, the live animations are great!

How feasible would it be replace DynamoRIO in drgat? e.g. using Intel PIN to trace.

[ncatlin]

Thanks!

That's a good question: At the start of the project I had intended to use PIN but spent days trying to compile a PINtool on my version of Visual Studio without success, so went with DR. With the significant caveat that I don't know the PIN API: I don't see any reason why it would be difficult.

PIN offers similar rich instrumentation capability (nothing particularly fancy is needed - symbols, branch tracking, maintaining state information for each basic block) and the visualiser simply reads the output from named pipes so a reimplementation of drgat in PIN - or anything else - should slot in quite seamlessly.

If it supports a wider range of binaries (i've met quite a few that DR just nope's out of) it would be well worth doing.