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IDA cybersecurity software provider Hex-Rays acquired

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Re: IDA cybersecurity software provider Hex-Rays acquired

#41

Post by rjzzleep »

deroad wrote: post #36
rjzzleep wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fantastic. So Rizin is a more active fork of r2 + iaito?

Re: IDA cybersecurity software provider Hex-Rays acquired

#42

Post by tux3 »

ylk wrote: post #30

More details here, but the article is in Dutch: https://archive.ph/Abxqp

Quoting from the translation:

""" With the new shareholders on board, Hex-Rays must evolve from an engineering company to a commercial company. “After the takeover, we want to structure the company, develop a commercial team and a management team and continue internationalization,” say Ingels and Luyten.

The intention is to transform the current commercial model of perpetual licenses into a recurring model. In the first model, customers pay a large amount at the start and then annually for updates and maintenance. The other includes an annual payment for the license and all associated services.

Hex-Rays' next growth phase will be led by a new CEO, who will take over from Guilfanov. He will eventually become chief technology officer (CTO) of the Liège company and chairman of the board of directors. """

Re: IDA cybersecurity software provider Hex-Rays acquired

#43

Post by ylk »

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…

For IDA Home they do give you their cloud decompiler for 64-bit binaries: “The 64-bit PC, ARM and PPC come with a compatible cloud-based Decompiler currently in beta testing mode” https://hex-rays.com/products/idahome/

But, like you said, IDA Home is additionally limited to one architecture, which is a bit annoying.

Re: IDA cybersecurity software provider Hex-Rays acquired

#44

Post by ylk »

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…

> 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.

It was all over their release announcement and Twitter, iirc. From their website: “For the price of $365 / year” https://hex-rays.com/products/idahome/

Re: IDA cybersecurity software provider Hex-Rays acquired

#45

Post by grzaks »

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…

> I think there are a lot of people that would like to pay for IDA but can't get it.

Many years ago we wanted to buy IDA Pro license and were quickly declined because we had whois privacy protection enabled on our domain.

Re: IDA cybersecurity software provider Hex-Rays acquired

#47

Post by zahllos »

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.

Depends a bit what you do. I work with firmware that uses all kinds of architectures. Paying an extra $2k per architecture I want the decompiler for is simply too much.

Yes, the license cost is likely marginal if you only disassemble Windows malware on Windows.

Re: IDA cybersecurity software provider Hex-Rays acquired

#48

Post by deroad »

rjzzleep wrote: post #41
deroad wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fantastic. So Rizin is a more active fork of r2 + iaito?

can't speak for r2, but we are definetely active. The project github page has better details :) But as far as i know rizin is the only tool capable to fully support flirt, and i would love to extend the support even more (and obviously add more features) in both tools (rizin & cutter).

Re: IDA cybersecurity software provider Hex-Rays acquired

#49

Post by luch »

bri3d wrote: post #16
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…

I disagree with this for a non-direct sales reason: before, you learned IDA, cracked or not. If you learned to reverse software of any kind, you acquired IDA. Now, more and more tutorials and introductions use Ghidra. Is it better than IDA? In some cases yes, in most not yet, but it’s easier to get. If I were Hex-Rays, I’d be very concerned with a generational shift as people stop bothering to pirate IDA and those wh…

Exactly, I am at a job where we have decades of cumulative experience using IDA and even we are wondering if we should not cut ourselves free of Hex-Rays's lock in and begrudgingly learn Ghidra.

For a "new" professional/team, it makes zero sense to buy a IDA license nowadays.

Re: IDA cybersecurity software provider Hex-Rays acquired

#50

Post by rfoo »

saagarjha wrote: post #33
tptacek wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ID…

It's hilarious that pirating a (DRM-less!) software is much easier than purchasing it. Even if you had the money and really want to buy it.
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