CuLifter: Lifting GPU Binaries to Typed IR

Abstract

GPU compilers merge all data types into a single unified register file, erasing the type information that binary-analysis tools rely on. We show that type recovery from this untyped register file is the central challenge of GPU binary lifting. We present CuLifter, a SASS-to-LLVM IR lifting framework that recovers register types via constraint propagation with conflict detection, reconstructs explicit control flow, and aggregates multi-instruction patterns. Across eight benchmark suites spanning open-source applications, vendor libraries, and optimized ML runtimes, CuLifter successfully lifts all 11,977 kernels to valid LLVM IR. Among the testable set, we achieve more than 90% execution correctness, verified via the CPU backend. An ablation study confirms that type recovery is the only step required to produce compilable IR: disabling it causes 86.9% of kernels to execute incorrectly.