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Ghidra: A software reverse engineering suite of tools developed by the NSA

ghidra-sre.org

91–100 of 147 posts

Re: Ghidra: A software reverse engineering suite of tools developed by the NSA

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be curious to know if anyone has audited this for malicious code, or how one would go about doing that in the first place. Is that kind of software auditing a use case for Ghidra? A demo of using Ghidra to audit Ghidra would be interesting I suppose.

Reflections on Trusting Trust is worth a read. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...

Not really. TLDR: You cannot trust code you did not botch up yourself.

Re: Ghidra: A software reverse engineering suite of tools developed by the NSA

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was quite suspicious of it when it was first announced, but an open source RE tool is probably the stupidest place to put a backdoor. Author considerations aside, it’s a great tool, and does pretty well with decompiling.

How well does it decompile itself ? I've always considered that a great test, much like a self-compiling compiler is a notable milestone. (I believe IDA has a check to stop you from doing this. Cracking that was one of the "rite of passage" exercises back in the day.)

It's open source and written in Java.

Re: Ghidra: A software reverse engineering suite of tools developed by the NSA

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they could install a virus on Iran's air-gapped uranium centrifuge industrial control systems, I'm pretty sure they could get one on your computer.

Bribing people in generally corrupt and poor countries to smuggle a USB stick is kind a different than just breaking into random persons home in a country with relatively low corruption. Latter might actually be more difficult. Obviously depends on what your end goal is

It's best not to assume a physical presence is required. Who is to say that the people at Let's Encrypt, NoScript, any of the firmwares' authors, or many other places weren't compromised years ago? It's sometimes worthwhile to reflect on where trust is placed.

Re: Ghidra: A software reverse engineering suite of tools developed by the NSA

#96
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bribing people in generally corrupt and poor countries to smuggle a USB stick is kind a different than just breaking into random persons home in a country with relatively low corruption. Latter might actually be more difficult. Obviously depends on what your end goal is

It's best not to assume a physical presence is required. Who is to say that the people at Let's Encrypt, NoScript, any of the firmwares' authors, or many other places weren't compromised years ago? It's sometimes worthwhile to reflect on where trust is placed.

I don’t know. Seeing how extensively these key signing ceremonies (Let’s Encrypt included) are designed against tampering and collusion, I’d be shocked and impressed if they were infiltrated.

We’ve found instead that the NSA can just take over your unpatched computer easily instead of putting in the effort of hacking Let’s Encrypt.

Re: Ghidra: A software reverse engineering suite of tools developed by the NSA

#97

I used this again just the other day with the cantor.dust plugin. My rev.eng skills are dull and were never great to begin with, but for anything below a real APT with obfuscation, runtime decoding and unpacking, Ghidra is an equalizer. Between this and Chef from gchq, someone with devops skills can probably skill up to an entry level threat analyst level in a few weeks or months. The tooling available today is reall…

You mean my electricity has been backdoored? Now that's paranoia on a different level, how does that work

I think their point is that it's either so futile to attempt, or so unlikely an issue, that the NSA targets US civilians that living off the grid is lower hanging fruit from an absolutist opsec perspective.

Re: Ghidra: A software reverse engineering suite of tools developed by the NSA

#98
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be curious to know if anyone has audited this for malicious code, or how one would go about doing that in the first place. Is that kind of software auditing a use case for Ghidra? A demo of using Ghidra to audit Ghidra would be interesting I suppose.

Its used to reverse engineer an unknown binary without the matching source code. Since Ghidra already is open source it be no use to audit Ghidra itself except for learning purposes. It might be useful to reverse engineer a closed source driver so you can write an open source one from scratch.

I would expect there to be self-mutating code such that when the open source code is compiled with a particular compiler it activates a different code path (written into the compiler itself) such that the final resulting binary does not correspond to the source code if it were compiled with another compiler.

And if this resulting binary is distributed, audits of the source code wouldn't catch these modifications.

Re: Ghidra: A software reverse engineering suite of tools developed by the NSA

#99
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there is anything fishy here, although I don't think the NSA can just install anything on my computer, even if I were based in the US. There is a lot of bluffing when it comes to cyber security. Still it might be quite a useful tool.

I guarantee that whatever browser you use, they have 0day for it. Whatever ISP you use, they can inject traffic into it, and they have a much easier time about it if you aren't in the US. If you're someone who uses the Internet, the NSA can take over whatever you use to browse with and have their way with it. If you don't, well that's what their interdiction program is for. The thing is though, the economics of 0day…

Indeed the best protection against getting 0day'd is probably to be into computer security. I feel confident that the NSA is not throwing 0days at computer security professionals; whereas they could use them on the average person with little risk of detection.

Re: Ghidra: A software reverse engineering suite of tools developed by the NSA

#100
post #96
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's best not to assume a physical presence is required. Who is to say that the people at Let's Encrypt, NoScript, any of the firmwares' authors, or many other places weren't compromised years ago? It's sometimes worthwhile to reflect on where trust is placed.

I don’t know. Seeing how extensively these key signing ceremonies (Let’s Encrypt included) are designed against tampering and collusion, I’d be shocked and impressed if they were infiltrated. We’ve found instead that the NSA can just take over your unpatched computer easily instead of putting in the effort of hacking Let’s Encrypt.

Unfortunately, a child can take over an unpatched computer using public exploits.

Please explain your comment about how key signing ceremonies stop people from being bribed. The creation of those keys creates a root of trust but doesn't stop leaf certs from being generated.

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