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Cutter – A Qt and C++ GUI for Radare2 reverse engineering framework

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Re: Cutter – A Qt and C++ GUI for Radare2 reverse engineering framework

#11

Post by colechristensen »

rocky12 wrote: post #8
colechristensen wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I looked into buying IDA Pro a while back and the experience was like buying enterprise software in 1997. There's not much of a reason for me to have it but it'd be a fun thing to have and toy with in spare time but I'm not really willing to pay an insane subscription price on a sketchy website.

Sure, but it's not really the type of tool you play with during the weekends. It's high powered and the industry standard. I, and many of my colleagues, would gladly play 4 or 5 times the price for IDA and Hex Rays. Though, any decent security company will purchase a subscription for it's employees.

>it's not really the type of tool you play with during the weekends

I am not so sure I agree. I can take another example, CAD software. There are high powered industry standard softwares which I would love to use on weekends and maybe even use in side projects for profit, but there's no way I can pay $2k/year and justify that. A $2k permanent license? Sure, it's a stretch but I'd probably go for it. 180/month though, whatever I'm doing would have to be really serious before I could justify that.

And I won't ever start at that price so the deal is dead.

There's a parallel in 3d printing. Not so long ago 3d printers were insanely expensive and only accessible to professionals. Now consumer grade machines are starting to replace machines that cost 10-100x more.

It's a frustrating thing about the economy where power tools that could enable a lot of people to do a lot of things are priced so that only a few people who can pay a lot can have access to them. I get that the people making them need to make a livelihood, but the frustration remains.

Re: Cutter – A Qt and C++ GUI for Radare2 reverse engineering framework

#12

Post by heathl »

colechristensen wrote: post #7
joshumax wrote: post #6

I've been watching the ecosystem of radare2 GUIs for a while now. I've loved IDA for its long-standing support of numerous architectures, as well as its built-in interpreter for running Python/IDC scripts with ease, however the price is nearly inhibitive for the average student or weekend hacker. IMO, the one major reason that radare isn't as widely adopted in the RE industry is simply because of a lack of GUIs that…

I looked into buying IDA Pro a while back and the experience was like buying enterprise software in 1997. There's not much of a reason for me to have it but it'd be a fun thing to have and toy with in spare time but I'm not really willing to pay an insane subscription price on a sketchy website.

https://www.hex-rays.com/products/ida/support/download_freew...

Version 7 is freeware now. Sure you don't get the decompiler and you're limited on target architectures, but it's still an amazing piece of software.

Re: Cutter – A Qt and C++ GUI for Radare2 reverse engineering framework

#13

Post by 49bc »

souprock wrote: post #2

Cutter is "A Qt and C++ GUI for radare2". There are more alternatives to IDA Pro. Hopper Disassembler is one. Binary Ninja (binja) is another. Here is an independent review of Binary Ninja: https://www.trailofbits.com/research-and-development/binja/ Here is the project itself: https://binary.ninja/ I happen to know most of the people involved in Binary Ninja. They do great work. They really understand security and th…

Ugh I read your job post months ago and I’m so interested in what you’re doing. I’m not aligned in any of the skills, just really interested about the actual work. What can you share?

Re: Cutter – A Qt and C++ GUI for Radare2 reverse engineering framework

#14

Post by stevekemp »

voltagex_ wrote: post #3
souprock wrote: post #2

Cutter is "A Qt and C++ GUI for radare2". There are more alternatives to IDA Pro. Hopper Disassembler is one. Binary Ninja (binja) is another. Here is an independent review of Binary Ninja: https://www.trailofbits.com/research-and-development/binja/ Here is the project itself: https://binary.ninja/ I happen to know most of the people involved in Binary Ninja. They do great work. They really understand security and th…

Reverse engineering has been a constant interest for me but I've never managed to get it to "click" for me. I don't particularly need the skill, but it's one I'd like to have (at least to the extent of being able to do simple crackmes).

My earliest exposure to computers was the ZX Spectrum, an 8-bit home-computer from the 80s, which was insanely populare in the UK.

Having few games, and little budget for more, most of the kids around would swap home-copied games. I used to have fun removing protection, or hacking the games for infinite lives. At the time I was 12-15 and it was very much a case of trial or error.

Assuming a game started with 3 lives I would look for every occurance of "LD A,3", and change the 3 to 5. If that didn't work I'd eventually replace every occurance of 3 with a different number. As you can imagine this was a tedious process!

If I was lucky enough to find the right "starting value" I'd then go on to look which memory-address the value was saved in. That would then let me search for that same address in the rest of the program, and hopefully spot something like:

     LD A,(addr)
     DEC A
     LD (addr),A
At that point I was done. Removing the decrement would stop the lives-counter from being decreased - giving you as many as you wanted.

Later I moved to the PC, and I found +fravia's site very educational. There are still mirrors which show how you could remove protection from commercial software - and oftentimes I'd be reminded of my previous attempts. Sometimes it is very simple, and sometimes not. Educational regardless.

Random mirror here - http://acrigs.com/FRAVIA/aca400.htm

The main reason I stopped this work? Few programs on Linux prompt you for license keys! But a good disassembler is a worthwhile thing to explore, whether for debugging your own code, or randomly exploring crackmes.

Re: Cutter – A Qt and C++ GUI for Radare2 reverse engineering framework

#15

Post by slobotron »

colechristensen wrote: post #11
rocky12 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but it's not really the type of tool you play with during the weekends. It's high powered and the industry standard. I, and many of my colleagues, would gladly play 4 or 5 times the price for IDA and Hex Rays. Though, any decent security company will purchase a subscription for it's employees.

>it's not really the type of tool you play with during the weekends I am not so sure I agree. I can take another example, CAD software. There are high powered industry standard softwares which I would love to use on weekends and maybe even use in side projects for profit, but there's no way I can pay $2k/year and justify that. A $2k permanent license? Sure, it's a stretch but I'd probably go for it. 180/month though,…

For free CAD, checkout OnShape if you don't mind all your drawings to be public.

https://www.onshape.com/

Re: Cutter – A Qt and C++ GUI for Radare2 reverse engineering framework

#16

Post by tptacek »

rocky12 wrote: post #8
colechristensen wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I looked into buying IDA Pro a while back and the experience was like buying enterprise software in 1997. There's not much of a reason for me to have it but it'd be a fun thing to have and toy with in spare time but I'm not really willing to pay an insane subscription price on a sketchy website.

Sure, but it's not really the type of tool you play with during the weekends. It's high powered and the industry standard. I, and many of my colleagues, would gladly play 4 or 5 times the price for IDA and Hex Rays. Though, any decent security company will purchase a subscription for it's employees.

Last I checked, they didn't do group subscriptions; you buy named licenses for each team member, and they're pretty unpleasant about the process.

Re: Cutter – A Qt and C++ GUI for Radare2 reverse engineering framework

#17

Post by guitarbill »

joshumax wrote: post #6

I've been watching the ecosystem of radare2 GUIs for a while now. I've loved IDA for its long-standing support of numerous architectures, as well as its built-in interpreter for running Python/IDC scripts with ease, however the price is nearly inhibitive for the average student or weekend hacker. IMO, the one major reason that radare isn't as widely adopted in the RE industry is simply because of a lack of GUIs that…

I'm not very experienced with RE, but for my limited use-case Cutter/radare2 is usually as good as free IDA version. For this one old MFC4.2 app, Cutter was actually better than IDA at demangling the symbols!

It's very exciting to have such a great tool available. IDA might actually be detrimental in the long run. We desperately need more pentesters/infosec folks, and this generation's exposure is more high-level. So open-source RE tooling is essential to get people interested and messing about with this stuff (IMO).

Re: Cutter – A Qt and C++ GUI for Radare2 reverse engineering framework

#18

Post by rescbr »

souprock wrote: post #2

Cutter is "A Qt and C++ GUI for radare2". There are more alternatives to IDA Pro. Hopper Disassembler is one. Binary Ninja (binja) is another. Here is an independent review of Binary Ninja: https://www.trailofbits.com/research-and-development/binja/ Here is the project itself: https://binary.ninja/ I happen to know most of the people involved in Binary Ninja. They do great work. They really understand security and th…

Loved the job description, but me not being an US citizen is a no-go, unfortunately.

Re: Cutter – A Qt and C++ GUI for Radare2 reverse engineering framework

#19

Post by zerr »

souprock wrote: post #2

Cutter is "A Qt and C++ GUI for radare2". There are more alternatives to IDA Pro. Hopper Disassembler is one. Binary Ninja (binja) is another. Here is an independent review of Binary Ninja: https://www.trailofbits.com/research-and-development/binja/ Here is the project itself: https://binary.ninja/ I happen to know most of the people involved in Binary Ninja. They do great work. They really understand security and th…

> Citizenship is a job requirement.

Do you do disassembly for government?

Re: Cutter – A Qt and C++ GUI for Radare2 reverse engineering framework

#20

Post by voltagex_ »

veganjay wrote: post #5
souprock wrote: post #2

Cutter is "A Qt and C++ GUI for radare2". There are more alternatives to IDA Pro. Hopper Disassembler is one. Binary Ninja (binja) is another. Here is an independent review of Binary Ninja: https://www.trailofbits.com/research-and-development/binja/ Here is the project itself: https://binary.ninja/ I happen to know most of the people involved in Binary Ninja. They do great work. They really understand security and th…

+1 for Hopper and BinaryNinja. Radare2 by itself has a small learning curve, but it is well worth it. It's usually the first dissassembler I turn to. Also helpful for dynamic analysis is GDB +PEDA. For some good intros for binary exploitation, see live overflows videos on YouTube.

I was given a short intro to GDB, +1 for PEDA making it a lot easier to understand (or at least, giving you enough context to know what's happening at a particular moment)
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