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Show HN: Ghidra MCP Server – 110 tools for AI-assisted reverse engineering

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Re: Show HN: Ghidra MCP Server – 110 tools for AI-assisted reverse engineering

#11

Post by stared »

Interesting to see Ghidra here!

A friend from work just used it (with Claude) to hack River Ride game (https://quesma.com/blog/ghidra-mcp-unlimited-lives/).

Inspired by the, I have it a try as well. While I have no prior experience with reverse engineering, I ported an old game from PowerPC to Apple Silicon.

First, including a few MCPs with Claude Code (including LaurieWired/GhidraMCP you forked from, and https://github.com/jtang613/GhidrAssistMCP). Yet, the agent fabricated as lot of code, instead for translating it from source.

I ended up using headless mode directly in Cursor + GPT 5.2 Codex. The results were the best.

Once I get some time, will share a write-up.

Re: Show HN: Ghidra MCP Server – 110 tools for AI-assisted reverse engineering

#12

Post by summarity »

Ive been using it (the original 15 tool version) for months now. It’s amazing. Any app's inner workings are suddenly transparent. I can track down bugs. Get a deeper understanding of any tool, and even write plug-ins or preload shims that mod any app. It’s like I finally actually _own_ the software I bought years ago.

For objective C heavy code, I also use Hopper Disassembler (which now has a built in MCP server).

Some related academic work (full recompilation with LLMs and Ghidra): https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3728958

Re: Show HN: Ghidra MCP Server – 110 tools for AI-assisted reverse engineering

#13

Post by junon »

summarity wrote: post #12

Ive been using it (the original 15 tool version) for months now. It’s amazing. Any app's inner workings are suddenly transparent. I can track down bugs. Get a deeper understanding of any tool, and even write plug-ins or preload shims that mod any app. It’s like I finally actually _own_ the software I bought years ago. For objective C heavy code, I also use Hopper Disassembler (which now has a built in MCP server). So…

Talking about RE'ing applications and equating that to OSS is not a good look when you work at GitHub...

Re: Show HN: Ghidra MCP Server – 110 tools for AI-assisted reverse engineering

#15

Post by MadnessASAP »

xnorswap wrote: post #3

Have you had any issues with models "refusing" to do reverse engineering work?

From my experience, OpenAI Codex loves reverse engineering work. In one case it did a very thorough job of disassembling a 8051 MCUs firmware and how it spoke to its attached LCD controller.

Another (semi-related) project, given the manufacturers of above MCUs proprietary flashing SDK, it found the programmers firmware, extracted the decryption key from the updating utility, decrypted the firmware and accompanying flashing software and is currently tracing the necessary signals to use an Arduino as a programmer.

So not only is it willing, it's actually quite good at it. My thinking is that reverse engineering is a lot of pattern recognition and not a lot of "original thinking". I.e. the agent doesn't need to come up with anything new, just recognise what already exists.

Re: Show HN: Ghidra MCP Server – 110 tools for AI-assisted reverse engineering

#16

Post by babas »

xerzes wrote: post #2

Hi HN, I built this because reverse engineering software across multiple versions is painful. You spend hours annotating functions in version 1.07, then version 1.08 drops and every address has shifted — all your work invisible. The core idea is a normalized function hashing system. It hashes functions by their logical structure — mnemonics, operand categories, control flow — not raw bytes or absolute addresses. When…

How does this compare to ReVa? https://github.com/cyberkaida/reverse-engineering-assistant

I think your installation instructions are incomplete. I followed the instructions and installed via file -> install in the project view. Restarted. But GhidraMCP is not visible in Tools after opening a binary.

Re: Show HN: Ghidra MCP Server – 110 tools for AI-assisted reverse engineering

#18

Post by NicuCalcea »

tarasyarema wrote: post #17

Simple question: why not a cli instead? As seems that lately LLM and agentic tools seems to be better at using clis rather than bloated MCPs?

I think they're only better for CLI tools that are in the training data. If it's a new tool, you'd need to dump the full documentation in the context either way.

Re: Show HN: Ghidra MCP Server – 110 tools for AI-assisted reverse engineering

#19

Post by s-macke »

stared wrote: post #11

Interesting to see Ghidra here! A friend from work just used it (with Claude) to hack River Ride game ( https://quesma.com/blog/ghidra-mcp-unlimited-lives/ ). Inspired by the, I have it a try as well. While I have no prior experience with reverse engineering, I ported an old game from PowerPC to Apple Silicon. First, including a few MCPs with Claude Code (including LaurieWired/GhidraMCP you forked from, and https://g…

I’ve also been playing around with reverse engineering, and I’m very impressed. It turns out that Codex with GPT-5.2 is better at reverse engineering than Claude.

For example, Codex can completely reverse-engineer this 1,300-line example [0] of a so-called C64-SID file within 30 minutes, without any human interaction.

I am working on a multi-agent system that can completely reverse-engineer C64 games. Old MS-DOS games are still too massive to analyze for my budget limit.

[0] https://gist.github.com/s-macke/595982d46d6699b69e1f0e051e7b...

Re: Show HN: Ghidra MCP Server – 110 tools for AI-assisted reverse engineering

#20

Post by derrida »

junon wrote: post #13
summarity wrote: post #12

Ive been using it (the original 15 tool version) for months now. It’s amazing. Any app's inner workings are suddenly transparent. I can track down bugs. Get a deeper understanding of any tool, and even write plug-ins or preload shims that mod any app. It’s like I finally actually _own_ the software I bought years ago. For objective C heavy code, I also use Hopper Disassembler (which now has a built in MCP server). So…

Talking about RE'ing applications and equating that to OSS is not a good look when you work at GitHub...

I have no idea about any of that but like I wasn't thinking of github until you mentioned it and this comment I upvoted because was informative and relevant to the discussion and I don't know about R.E but curious to try and this kind of activity just seems like the sort of things people who are interested in software, learning and aware of security do... like to find bugs or malware or something... FOSS or not - actually "especially if not FOSS" you'd kinda like people to scan their binaries at and have that knowledge indigenous wouldn't you? while thinking of code security etc, anyway

Is this a bad look for Derrida.org?

Anyway, "not my business"

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