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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

#21
post #16
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.

I've been using ReVa for a long time (even upstreamed some changes to it) and it works great.

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

#22
post #19
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 game…

Oh, interesting. I started using the ReVa/Ghidra MCP server together with Claude since day 1 (Well, since Claude Sonnet 4.0 was released) and I saw Claude get better at it with every update. I've gotten pretty far in reverse engineering a game from the early 2000s (though I still have to do a lot of things manually, but this then also taught me A TON about Ghidra)

I'm very interested in trying out Codex now.

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

#23

I thought MCP interfaces with high amounts of tools perform much worse than MCP interfaces with fewer tools, this doesn't seem like a great design. This also seems to just be vibecoded garbage.

True. Though vibecoded skill-based tools would perform much more efficiently than this.

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

#24

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?

This is what I was thinking, or fewer, more versatile tools. Having the description of 110 tools in your context window at all times is just noise.

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

#25

I thought MCP interfaces with high amounts of tools perform much worse than MCP interfaces with fewer tools, this doesn't seem like a great design. This also seems to just be vibecoded garbage.

Haven't looked at the app itself but the MCP tool problem is mainly solved now using lazy loading, it's far from perfect but the immediate context window overload problem is gone (in clients that support it anyway).

Now just onto the fact that most MCP tools are just transforming API calls and their functionality and return data structures suck for LLM's....

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

#26
post #13

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...

That's why I put it in quotes. In no way am I equating anything. Making the inner workings visible is what I was referring to.

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

#27
I have this weird thing with Ghidra where I can’t get it to disassemble .s37 or .hex flash files for PPC (e200z4). The bytes show OK and I’m pretty sure I’m selecting the right language. Any insight on things to try would be appreciated.

IDA work(ed) fine but I misplaced my license somewhere.

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

#28
I was just looking for an active fork of LaurieWired/GhidraMCP. I am currently using GhidrAssistMCP.

First impressions of the fork: everything has deviated too much from the original. look a bit sloppy in places. Everything seems overly complicated in areas where it could have been simpler.

There is an error in the release: Ghidra → File → Configure → Miscellaneous → Enable GhidraMCP. Developer not Miscellaneous.

I can't test it in antigravity there tools limit per mcp: Error: adding this instance with 110 enabled tools would exceed max limit of 100.

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

#29

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.

[dead]

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

#30
How could this be more efficiently and elegantly refactored as an Anthropic or MOOLLM skill set that was composable and repeatable (skills calling other skills, and iterating over MANY fast skill calls, in ONE llm completion call, as opposed many slow MCP calls ping-ponging back and forth, waiting for network delay + tokenization/detokenization cost, quantization and distortion each round)?

What parts of Ghidra (like cross referencing, translating, interpreting text and code) can be "uplifted" and inlined into skills that run inside the LLM completion call on a large context window without doing token IO and glacially slow and frequently repeated remote procedure calls to external MCP servers?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46878126

>There's a fundamental architectural difference being missed here: MCP operates BETWEEN LLM complete calls, while skills operate DURING them. Every MCP tool call requires a full round-trip — generation stops, wait for external tool, start a new complete call with the result. N tool calls = N round-trips. Skills work differently. Once loaded into context, the LLM can iterate, recurse, compose, and run multiple agents all within a single generation. No stopping. No serialization.

>Skills can be MASSIVELY more efficient and powerful than MCP, if designed and used right. [...]

Leela MOOLLM Demo Transcript: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/LEELA-...

>I call this "speed of light" as opposed to "carrier pigeon". In my experiments I ran 33 game turns with 10 characters playing Fluxx — dialogue, game mechanics, emotional reactions — in a single context window and completion call. Try that with MCP and you're making hundreds of round-trips, each suffering from token quantization, noise, and cost. Skills can compose and iterate at the speed of light without any detokenization/tokenization cost and distortion, while MCP forces serialization and waiting for carrier pigeons.

speed-of-light skill: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/skills/speed-o...

More: Speed of Light -vs- Carrier Pigeon (an allegory for Skills -vs- MCP):

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/SPEED-...

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