You say "in order to disassemble and make sense of them", but the "sense" that a disassembler makes can just be the direct conversion from machine code to equiv

You say "in order to disassemble and make sense of them", but the "sense" that a disassembler makes can just be the direct conversion from machine code to equivalent assembley. Machine code is just another syntax, directly converting that into assembly can happen instruction-by-instruction. Making more sensible assembly that a human would write is another thing, if you want to follow jumps to figure out where instructions are and regenerate labels, then that's one step towards semantics. I don't know what kinds of invariants panopticon is looking at, but there seems to be code for static analysis using abstract interpretation[1]. This could do the data-flow analysis, determine types and recognize persistent variables. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_interpretation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_interpretation