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Ghidra, NSA's reverse-engineering tool

nsa.gov

31–40 of 425 posts

Re: Ghidra, NSA's reverse-engineering tool

#31
post #18
post #12

Annndddd, it's ugly as fuck. Well, I'm not going to install something made by the NSA on my machine but I'd be interested in feedback.

It's not as if IDA is a work of art. Arguably, this is a cleaner, more usable interface.

Totally, that's why I was hopping for something better looking. Looks like Binary Ninja is the only one that cares about that.

Re: Ghidra, NSA's reverse-engineering tool

#33
post #22
post #11

I am going to sound pessimistic here, but isn't there a real danger of having this technology available to bad actors and is there any value to keeping such things confidential if it plays a role in national security? If someone was releasing malicious software to hijack the power grid as an example, wouldn't they be first able to use this to try to improve the robustness and invisibility of their attack ? Or is the…

Not at all,this helps analyze malware not create it. There is no security obtained by preventing reverse engineering of a binary. If anything this makes adversaries ability to hide their methodoligies harder,a strategic advantage for someone like the US government.

I am not sure I completely agree. If I know how my adversary detects and studies stealth code, I may be able to design better stealth code that is better at evading their methods of detection.

I mean the evolution of stealth tech in military has followed a similar path. As radar systems improve over decades, they keep on working on new ways to evade detection for aviation/missile tech.

I understand the high level point of good tools being more widely available to the white hat crowd, but I am trying to understand the argument that this is 100% better in all cases and there are no downsides.

Re: Ghidra, NSA's reverse-engineering tool

#34

Why this is important (for those uninitiated): - Ghidra is basically the first real competitor to IDA Pro, the extremely expensive and often pirated state-of-the-art software for reverse engineering. Nothing else has come close to IDA Pro. - Ghidra is open-source, IDA Pro is not. - Ghidra has a lot of really cool features that IDA Pro doesn't, such as decompiling binaries to pseudo-C code. - It's also collaborative,…

> Ghidra has a lot of really cool features that IDA Pro doesn't, such as decompiling binaries to pseudo-C code.

To be fair, IDA Pro has a decompiler plugin to do this.

Re: Ghidra, NSA's reverse-engineering tool

#35

Why this is important (for those uninitiated): - Ghidra is basically the first real competitor to IDA Pro, the extremely expensive and often pirated state-of-the-art software for reverse engineering. Nothing else has come close to IDA Pro. - Ghidra is open-source, IDA Pro is not. - Ghidra has a lot of really cool features that IDA Pro doesn't, such as decompiling binaries to pseudo-C code. - It's also collaborative,…

> Ghidra has a lot of really cool features that IDA Pro doesn't, such as decompiling binaries to pseudo-C code. To be fair, IDA Pro has a decompiler plugin to do this.

It does, but it costs an extra $1.5k on top of the main software, per architecture.

Re: Ghidra, NSA's reverse-engineering tool

#36
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a competitor to IDA's monopoly, basically. It might be better in certain aspects.

IDA has a bunch of competitors --- Hopper, Binja, and all the Capstone interfaces.

Yup, well aware of them (I think Hopper uses Capstone, FWIW). I'm sure you agree that they're not quite at the level of IDA, though ;)

Re: Ghidra, NSA's reverse-engineering tool

#37

Why this is important (for those uninitiated): - Ghidra is basically the first real competitor to IDA Pro, the extremely expensive and often pirated state-of-the-art software for reverse engineering. Nothing else has come close to IDA Pro. - Ghidra is open-source, IDA Pro is not. - Ghidra has a lot of really cool features that IDA Pro doesn't, such as decompiling binaries to pseudo-C code. - It's also collaborative,…

> Ghidra has a lot of really cool features that IDA Pro doesn't, such as decompiling binaries to pseudo-C code. To be fair, IDA Pro has a decompiler plugin to do this.

For which they charge a per-CPU fortune https://www.hex-rays.com/cgi-bin/quote.cgi

Re: Ghidra, NSA's reverse-engineering tool

#38

Why this is important (for those uninitiated): - Ghidra is basically the first real competitor to IDA Pro, the extremely expensive and often pirated state-of-the-art software for reverse engineering. Nothing else has come close to IDA Pro. - Ghidra is open-source, IDA Pro is not. - Ghidra has a lot of really cool features that IDA Pro doesn't, such as decompiling binaries to pseudo-C code. - It's also collaborative,…

Think BinaryNinja has been acting pretty effectively as a competitor to IDA Pro. Its much cheaper than IDA, has a good API and I have been a very happy customer.

Re: Ghidra, NSA's reverse-engineering tool

#39
post #31
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not as if IDA is a work of art. Arguably, this is a cleaner, more usable interface.

Totally, that's why I was hopping for something better looking. Looks like Binary Ninja is the only one that cares about that.

And Hopper!

Re: Ghidra, NSA's reverse-engineering tool

#40
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IDA has a bunch of competitors --- Hopper, Binja, and all the Capstone interfaces.

Yup, well aware of them (I think Hopper uses Capstone, FWIW). I'm sure you agree that they're not quite at the level of IDA, though ;)

I'm not especially a fan of IDA, but I don't do much of this work anymore and haven't had a reason to catch up. IDA definitely wouldn't be the first tool I'd reach for in 2019.
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