Fracture: Another Open-Source Decompiler Project

Fracture is another open-source project aiming to offer users/developers the ability to decompile binaries back into an intermediate form.

There have been many open-source de-compilation projects written about in the past on Phoronix such as the Capstone Disassembly Framework, Libbeauty for decompiling binaries in the name of reverse-engineering, Dagger, and other projects. Nearly all of these open-source decompiler projects are using the LLVM compiler infrastructure for doing much of the heavy lifting.

Today to write about is yet another open-source LLVM de-compilation project, Fracture. The Fracture project is BSD-licensed and aims to have architecture-independent support for taking binaries back to LLVM IR, the generic intermediate representation form used by LLVM.

Right now Fracture supports decompiling ARM binaries but x86 is actively being worked on and there's also plans for supporting PowerPC and MIPS. While progress is being made, there's many features that still need to be handled like conditionals, complex language structs, high-level type recovery, and other features.

Those wishing to learn more about Fracture can visit its GitHub project site. Fracture was recently brought up on the LLVM mailing list and there's even talk about possible interest in upstreaming Fracture inside LLVM.