Paper submission deadlines are usually about 9 months before the conference, although ISSTA 2020 apparently had its submission deadline in January 27 (~6 months before the conference).
I have multiple disagreements: "ARM is becoming the dominant architecture". No - while a valid statement in 2012-ish, the truth (since about 2016) is "ARM is the dominant architecture". If disassembling binaries without symbols is a problem, then your skills/methods need improvement.
Been there, dealt with that: binary translation of VAX/VMS, Mips/Ultrix, Sparc/Solaris to Alpha (various OS's)
Here are the radare2 and Ghidra reports:
https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra/issues/657
https://github.com/radareorg/radare2/issues/14223
For those who cannot download it:
#ABSTRACT
===
With the increasing popularity of embedded devices,ARM isbecom-
ing the dominant architecture for them. In the meanwhile, there is
a pressing need to perform security assessments for these devices.
Due to different types of peripherals, it is challenging to dynami-
cally run the firmware of these devices in an emulated environment.
Therefore, the static analysis is still commonly used. Existing work
usually leverages off-the-shelf tools to disassemble stripped ARM
binaries and (implicitly) assume that reliable disassembling binaries
and function recognition are solved problems. However, whether
this assumption really holds is unknown.
In this paper, we conduct the first comprehensive study on
ARM disassembly tools. Specifically, we build 1 , 896 ARM bina-
ries (including 248 obfuscated ones) with different compilers, com-
piling options, and obfuscation methods. We then evaluate them
using eight state-of-the-art ARM disassembly tools (including both
commercial and noncommercial ones) on their capabilities to lo-
cate instructions and function boundaries. These two are funda-
mental ones, which are leveraged to build other primitives. Our
work reveals some observations that have not been systemati-
cally summarized and/or confirmed. For instance, we find that
the existence of both ARM and Thumb instruction sets, and the
reuse of the BL instruction for both function calls and branches
bring serious challenges to disassembly tools. Our evaluation sheds
light on the limitations of state-of-the-art disassembly tools and
points out potential directions for improvement. To engage the
community, we release the data set, and the related scripts at
https://github.com/valour01/arm_disasssembler_study.