Mike Van Emmerik

• Name : Mike Van Emmerik
• Title : Dr
• Qualifications : B.E. (Hons), B.Sc (Comp Sci), PhD.
• Email : emmerik at gmail dot com

• M. Van Emmerik. Static Single Assignment for Decompilation. PhD thesis, School of ITEE, University of Queensland, 2007. Also in compressed postscript.
• M. Van Emmerik and T. Waddington. "Using a Decompiler for Real-World Source Recovery", the Working Conference on Reverse Engineering Delft, Netherlands, 9th-12th November 2004. An extended version of the paper can be downloaded here.
• C Cifuentes, M Van Emmerik, N Ramsey and B Lewis, Experience in the Design, Implementation and Use of a Retargetable Static Binary Translation Framework, Sun Microsystems Laboratories, Technical Report TR-2002-105, January 2002.
  
• C Cifuentes and M Van Emmerik. Recovery of Jump Table Case Statements from Binary Code. Science of Computer Programming, 40 (2001): 171-188
• C Cifuentes, T Waddington, and M Van Emmerik. Computer Security Analysis through Decompilation and High-Level Debugging. Decompilation Techniques Workshop, Proceedings of the Eighth Working Conference on Reverse Engineering , Stuttgart, Germany, October 2001, IEEE-CS Press, pp 375-380.
• C Cifuentes, M Van Emmerik, and N. Ramseyr. The Design of a Resourceable and Retargetable Binary Translator. Proceedings of the Sixth Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, Atlanta, USA, October1999, IEEE-CS Press, pp 280-291.
• C Cifuentes and M Van Emmerik. Recovery of Jump Table Case Statements from Binary Code. Proceedings of the International Workshop on Program Comprehension, Pittsburgh, USA, May 1999, IEEE-CS Press, pp 192-199.
• M Van Emmerik. Identifying Library Functions in Executable Files Using Patterns. Proceedings of the 1998 Australian Software Engineering Conference, Adelaide, 9th to 13th November, 1998, IEEE-CS Press, pp 90-97. Available from IEEE Xplorer (alternative and proceedings). An earlier version is available in postscript form.

• Doctor of Philosophy, School of ITEE, University of Queensland. Title "Static Single Assignment for Decompilation". Advisors Prof. Paul Bailes and Dr. Cristina Cifuentes.
• 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.

2001-2007
Following the tech crash, I started my PhD on decompilation.

2002. Part time teaching.

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

Last updated 3rd Nov 2007: Phd; Added WCRE security analysis paper