Mike Van Emmerik

• Name : Mike Van Emmerik
• Title : Mr
• Qualifications : B.E. (Hons), B.Sc (Comp Sci)
• Position : Senior Research Assistant
• Room : 523 General Purpose South ( School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, The University of Queensland)
• Email : emmerik at itee.uq.edu dot au
• Research Groups :
• Centre for Software Maintenance
• Publications :
• "Recovery of Jump Table Case Statements from Binary Code", C Cifuentes and M Van Emmerik, Science of Computer Programming, 40 (2001): 171-188.
• "Computer Security Analysis through Decompilation and High-Level Debugging", C Cifuentes, T Waddington, and M Van Emmerik, Decompilation Techniques Workshop, Proceedings of the Eighth Working Conference on Reverse Engineering , Stuttgart, Germany, October 2001, IEEE-CS Press, pp 375-380.
• "UQBT: Adaptable Binary Translation at Low Cost", C Cifuentes and M Van Emmerik, Computer, Vol 33, No 3, March 2000, IEEE Computer Society Press, pp 60-66
• "Preliminary Experiences with the Use of the UQBT Binary Translation Framework", C Cifuentes, M Van Emmerik, D Ung, D Simon and T Waddington, Proceedings of the Workshop on Binary Translation, NewPort Beach, Oct 16, 1999. Technical Committee on Computer Architecture Newsletter , IEEE-CS Press, Dec 1999, pp 12-22.
• "The Design of a Resourceable and Retargetable Binary Translator", C Cifuentes, M Van Emmerik, and N. Ramsey, Proceedings of the Sixth Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, Atlanta, USA, October 1999, IEEE-CS Press, pp 280-291.
• "Recovery of Jump Table Case Statements from Binary Code", C Cifuentes and M Van Emmerik, Proceedings of the International Workshop on Program Comprehension, Pittsburgh, USA, May 1999, IEEE-CS Press, pp 192-199.
• "Identifying Library Functions in Executable Files Using Patterns", Van Emmerik M. J., Proceedings of  the 1998 Australian Software Engineering Conference, Adelaide, 9th to 13th November, 1998. An earlier version is available in postscript form
• Education:
• Bachelor of Engineering, University of Queensland, First Class Honours 1980.
• Bachelor of Science (Specialising in Computer Science), University of Queensland, 1979.
• Matriculated St Edmunds' College, Ipswich, Queensland 1975. Dux of school; highest Tertiary Entrance score, straight 7s in year 12.

History

1976-1989
I am a nuts and bolts programmer. During the good old days of 8 bit microcomputers (SC/MP, 2650, Z80) and beyond, my favourite language was assembler. I spent my first decade in the workforce at Telecom Australia (now Telstra) as an electrical engineer. One of my earliest notable achievments was The Great Flight Simulator Hack of 1982. The 2650 was one of my favourite processors; I co-authored 2650 DOS with my friend Ron Harris.

My interest in disassemblers started in the 8 bit microcomputer days. Inspired by Resource for CP/M (by Ward Christensen), a friend (Ron Harris) and I produced a highly modified and refined version for the Z80. [This program in turn inspired another program, much enhanced again, with the same catchy name, for the Amiga computer. It is written by Glen McDiarmid, and until recently was still commercially available]. I owned an Amiga computer (model 1000, later model 2000) from about its second year of availability (1988?).

1990-1992
I worked at Telecom Australia on a project called Drift. Drift is basically a multisession communications program with a scripting language, which was able to perform miracles with old mainframe software (legacyware) in Telecom. I found myself working on the low level aspects of Drift, such as writing a VxD (virtual device driver). I also took it upon myself to become the local expert on the Periscope (In Circuit Emulator) hardware that the section owned. You don't get much lower level than that, apart from microcode!

1993
My interest in disassemblers led me to work for a year at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) on disassembly tools. Part of the work there was to support Cristina Cifuentes with her thesis project, a decompiler (reverse compiler) called dcc. During that year, I developed a method of identifying library code in executable files using signatures , and wrote a paper on the subject. This paper is published as "Identifying Library Functions in Executable Files Using Patterns", Proceedings of the 1998 Australian Software Engineering Conference, Adelaide, 1998. After the project, Cristina and I occasionally tinker with dcc in our spare time. This project has led us to an interest in binary translation of executables.

1995-1999
I wrote Windows Field Terminal (WFT) for Telstra as a contractor, with a lot of help from Andrew Sheppard of Telstra. The program does most of the features of the Dos Field Terminal (DFT), but with a more GUI feel, and is able to run multiple sessions on a single computer. I believe that WFT (and DFT) are still used by Telstra for managing some fault reports.

1997-2001
In 1997, Cristina Cifuentes received Australian Research Council (ARC) large grant A49702762 ("Migration of Legacy
Software by  Binary Translation"). I worked as a Senior Research Assistant to Cristina for the three years of the grant, and continued on with other research funds, notably from Sun Microsystems. The main output from this research is the University of Queensland Binary Translator (UQBT), released in 2002 under a BSD license, and research papers.

2001-
The "dot bomb" hit the UQBT project. I'm currently completing a PhD on decompilation, teaching part time.

The Decompilation page (now in TWiki format).
Mike's Home Page 

Last updated 16th June: Added WCRE security analysis paper