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IDA cybersecurity software provider Hex-Rays acquired

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Re: IDA cybersecurity software provider Hex-Rays acquired

#31

Post by Briggs958 »

mike_d wrote: post #11
stolen_biscuit wrote: post #7

Does anyone know what impact if any the release of Ghidra had on Hex-Rays? IDA never really accommodated to the hobbyist, so I wonder did it have any impact on the commercial side of things apart from the IDA Home release?

Very little. Everyone who was passing around pirated copies of IDA continued to do so before and after the release of Ghidra. More than anything I think binary.ninja started to eat their lunch because it was a far superior experience and up front reasonable pricing. Hex-Rays did ultimately release IDA Home, but you have to sign up for an account to even find out what their hobbyist license costs. I cannot underscore…

[dead]

Re: IDA cybersecurity software provider Hex-Rays acquired

#32

Post by ylk »

rjzzleep wrote: post #10
pseudo0 wrote: post #8

Hopefully this works out for Hex-Rays, allowing them to invest more into developing IDA and expanding their low-cost product offerings. The general sentiment I have seen among people doing SRE is that IDA is rapidly losing market share to Ghidra. While it excels in some areas, the licenses are pricy even for tech employers, and entirely out of reach for students or colleges. It's hard to convince an employer to fork…

For me I got the Company I was contracting for to buy me an IDA license and as I was trying to take over from there Hexrays never responded to any requests. I'm guessing that I'm on the same pirate blacklist that a lot of people landed. I guess I should have expensed it instead of having the Company buy it. I was the only person doing RE work, it was a single user person license and I was also the only linux user out…

It’s not r2 or ghidra, but binary ninja has signature libraries: “The matching algorithm is inspired by FLIRT, which was designed with similar requirements in mind.”

https://binary.ninja/2020/03/11/signature-libraries.html

Re: IDA cybersecurity software provider Hex-Rays acquired

#33

Post by saagarjha »

tptacek wrote: post #17
yakkityyak wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ended up buying Binary Ninja for hobbyist projects instead. Worked great for doing a bit of Gameboy Advance rom hacking. IDA Pro for ARM w/ a decompiler is the cost of a used car.

It's roughly the cost of a very good Macbook, right? Many companies that employ the kinds of people who spend their days in IDA don't bat an eye at the cost of the laptops.

Right, but if you want that MacBook you call up Apple and they will ship you those computers tomorrow, hassle-free, and you can hand those laptops to any of your employees without someone harassing you for how you're doing licensing. For large companies the issue isn't even the cost but the annoyance. Like, the employees who use those IDA licenses are paid pretty well…annoyances you put in the path of them getting IDA that waste their time are pretty expensive too.

Re: IDA cybersecurity software provider Hex-Rays acquired

#35

Post by WirelessGigabit »

tptacek wrote: post #12

This seems like "acquired" in a different sense than we normally mean; it's more like an announcement of an investment round than an acquisition, right?

He sold majority share to an investment group. So every button will now become an in-app purchase. Function decompilations will cost in-app currencies.

And today they’re offering the pro-pack. 10,000 decomp units for $1,200 bucks. Of course now they can devalue the value of a unit at will.

Re: IDA cybersecurity software provider Hex-Rays acquired

#36

Post by deroad »

rjzzleep wrote: post #10
pseudo0 wrote: post #8

Hopefully this works out for Hex-Rays, allowing them to invest more into developing IDA and expanding their low-cost product offerings. The general sentiment I have seen among people doing SRE is that IDA is rapidly losing market share to Ghidra. While it excels in some areas, the licenses are pricy even for tech employers, and entirely out of reach for students or colleges. It's hard to convince an employer to fork…

For me I got the Company I was contracting for to buy me an IDA license and as I was trying to take over from there Hexrays never responded to any requests. I'm guessing that I'm on the same pirate blacklist that a lot of people landed. I guess I should have expensed it instead of having the Company buy it. I was the only person doing RE work, it was a single user person license and I was also the only linux user out…

Rizin (and Cutter) does fully support FLIRT. You can create and load them, we also provide sigdb which is a collection of FLIRT files created by us (and yes, they are 100% compatible with IDA if you ever want to use them). - https://github.com/rizinorg/cutter/releases/tag/v2.1.0 - https://github.com/rizinorg/rizin/releases/tag/v0.4.0 - https://github.com/rizinorg/sigdb

beware that these are not the latest versions.

Re: IDA cybersecurity software provider Hex-Rays acquired

#37

Post by ev1 »

pseudo0 wrote: post #25
tptacek wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've long since lost track of the pricing here, but the per-arch stuff is for the decompiler, right?

Yeah, that's for the decompiler. And I just saw your edit and agree that they are in a tricky spot. Their product is hyper-specialized and they deserve to get paid for the craft and expertise that they have put into their product, but at the same time they have been a significant barrier to entry for people getting into SRE due to the prohibitive cost. Their new offering of a limited license for $365 a year is a step…

Can you even get the limited licence? It feels like they are comically hostile, ask for a huge amount of really unnecessary things, "KYC procedures", for a $1/day commodity software

Re: IDA cybersecurity software provider Hex-Rays acquired

#38

Post by zahllos »

duskwuff wrote: post #22
mike_d wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very little. Everyone who was passing around pirated copies of IDA continued to do so before and after the release of Ghidra. More than anything I think binary.ninja started to eat their lunch because it was a far superior experience and up front reasonable pricing. Hex-Rays did ultimately release IDA Home, but you have to sign up for an account to even find out what their hobbyist license costs. I cannot underscore…

> Hex-Rays did ultimately release IDA Home, but you have to sign up for an account to even find out what their hobbyist license costs. And even then, IDA Home comes with some pretty serious limitations. It's not just a no-commercial-use version of IDA Pro; it's also a cut-down version with no decompiler, no batch mode, and which only disassembles code for one processor family (which you have to choose at the time of…

IDA Pro doesn't come with a decompiler either. For that you need to spend extra and pay for the hex-rays license on top of the price for the disassembler.

The total price kicks licensing costs well outside that of hobbyist use cases.

Re: IDA cybersecurity software provider Hex-Rays acquired

#39

Post by [deleted] »

mike_d wrote: post #11
stolen_biscuit wrote: post #7

Does anyone know what impact if any the release of Ghidra had on Hex-Rays? IDA never really accommodated to the hobbyist, so I wonder did it have any impact on the commercial side of things apart from the IDA Home release?

Very little. Everyone who was passing around pirated copies of IDA continued to do so before and after the release of Ghidra. More than anything I think binary.ninja started to eat their lunch because it was a far superior experience and up front reasonable pricing. Hex-Rays did ultimately release IDA Home, but you have to sign up for an account to even find out what their hobbyist license costs. I cannot underscore…

[deleted]

Re: IDA cybersecurity software provider Hex-Rays acquired

#40

Post by sam_lowry_ »

WirelessGigabit wrote: post #35
tptacek wrote: post #12

This seems like "acquired" in a different sense than we normally mean; it's more like an announcement of an investment round than an acquisition, right?

He sold majority share to an investment group. So every button will now become an in-app purchase. Function decompilations will cost in-app currencies. And today they’re offering the pro-pack. 10,000 decomp units for $1,200 bucks. Of course now they can devalue the value of a unit at will.

AFAIU Ilfak is planning retirement. Retirement and tired have the same root. He got in this business pretty much accidentally and never wanted to become the most hated person in wannabe cracker circles.
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