Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

IDA: What's new in 7.00

hex-rays.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 57 posts

Re: IDA: What's new in 7.00

#21

Post by yan »

bitexploder wrote: post #3

A quick overview of what makes IDA cool for those unfamiliar with it: * It has one of the best decompilers available * It supports a ridiculous number of platforms * I trust its disassembler (especially for mainstream languages) more than almost any other disassembler * Demangling of Swift names is a nice quality of life improvement, Swift moves fast and is hard to keep up with * Still the best disassembler and machi…

You'd be remiss if you don't mention Binary Ninja[1]. A relative newcomer that's already extremely capable, has great scripting support and is under very active development.

[1] https://binary.ninja/

Re: IDA: What's new in 7.00

#22

Post by Pete_D »

adamnemecek wrote: post #16
Toast_25 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your source on this? And what's preventing users from simply deleting the files/formatting their OS/getting a new e-mail?

Second paragraph of Hex-Ray's stance on piracy https://books.google.com/books?id=3nPAM3AZ1foC&pg=PA32&lpg=P...

If I'm reading this right, the blacklist only applies to people who leak their legally purchased copies, not everyone who's ever used a pirated copy.

Re: IDA: What's new in 7.00

#23

Post by tptacek »

utku_karatas2 wrote: post #15
adamnemecek wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's my understanding that people who have previously pirated it are blacklisted from every using the sw legally thereby potentially making it impossible to get a job in the industry.

How do you even enforce such a policy? And who the hell is IDA run by? The Soup Nazi?

Pretty much. They took a run at us about 10 years ago. I wrote a sort of semi-popular blog post about figuring out what crypto an app uses by looking for constants for particular crypto algorithms using IDA, and they looked me up in their license database and freaked out publicly because I wasn't registered. We privately pointed out that we were using a letter-coded license on behalf of a client, and they called us liars because they could only think of a few clients they had with such a licensing arrangement (obviously, we weren't in a position to tell them which client it was).

This is, again, for a simple mention of IDA in a public blog post.

After Ilfak left DataRescue to do Hex-rays, his Hex-rays IDA pages kept the one blacklisting the dude they had caught pirating.

Amusingly, the DataRescue IDA page is basically only about piracy now:

http://www.datarescue.com/idabase/

Whatever the "expectation" about piracy there is for IDA, it seems safe to say the IDA people themselves don't share it.

Re: IDA: What's new in 7.00

#24

Post by tptacek »

adamnemecek wrote: post #2

the prices are still kinda ridiculous for hobbyists. i realize those might not be the main customers.

It's expensive, but it probably doesn't cost nearly enough. IDA is the Microsoft Word of software reverse engineering, and its low price relative to the bill rates of people who actually use it is a boat anchor for the entire reversing market. It's difficult to charge more than IDA charges for new products. Since the market for reversing products is always going to involve a relatively small number of people doing very high-value work, it's hard to build a sustainable business in it.

Now that IDA has very serious competition, from Binja and Hopper, it's unlikely that problem is going to resolve itself in the long term.

Re: IDA: What's new in 7.00

#25

Post by endorphone »

Has anyone with IDA Pro had luck with mcsema (or anything similar)?

The idea of taking arbitrary x86/amd64 binaries and converting them to LLVM IR is a concept that fascinates me and I've always been curious what the optimization paths would be -- if you took a go binary output, converted it to LLVM IR, and then compiled with an optimizing LLVM pass how does the result compare, for instance.

Re: IDA: What's new in 7.00

#26

Post by rootw0rm »

AlexMax wrote: post #8
_xhok wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's expected that hobbyists will pirate it.

I have no first hand knowledge, but it is my understanding based on what others have told me that IDA Pro is actually kind of difficult to crack and pirate. I don't know how true this is, but it makes logical sense - the developers of a reverse-engineering tool are likely far more clever at anti-piracy mitigations than your average programmer.

yeah, it's not the easiest to circumvent. 7.0 will probably see a scene release tho.

Re: IDA: What's new in 7.00

#27

Post by systems »

Mahn wrote: post #17
systems wrote: post #10

what is this used for?

Reverse engineering. Basically, if you want to take a compiled binary apart to figure out how it works, IDA is the best tool that there is for that job.

beside curiosity .. and maybe learning

what are the common business usage for this, who uses this daily to do his work .. if this use case exist at all

for this price, i imagine there must be a very dedicate niche who needs this, who is this niche

Re: IDA: What's new in 7.00

#28

Post by Avery3R »

captainmuon wrote: post #13
_xhok wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's expected that hobbyists will pirate it.

I would be afraid to use a pirated version of this. Certainly the authors are experts in cracking and countermeasures. They could do sneaky stuff like pretending to work and then breaking later, or silently produce wrong output. I heard a rumor that the cracked version calls home with your identity and blacklists you for life. Don't think it is true though. (Edit: I think what they do is they embed your key into save…

If a database was created using an instance of IDA that was running on a known blacklisted key you'll get a "Sorry, you can't open this database because it was created using a pirated version of IDA" message, and if you try to open a database that's missing the license info you'll get a "Database is corrupt." message. It's still pretty easy to patch out these messages and open the databases anyways though.

There's also a map [1] on the old IDA website showing geolocated IPs of users that tried to request updates using pirated keys.

[1] http://www.datarescue.com/idabase/

Re: IDA: What's new in 7.00

#29

Post by bitexploder »

yan wrote: post #21
bitexploder wrote: post #3

A quick overview of what makes IDA cool for those unfamiliar with it: * It has one of the best decompilers available * It supports a ridiculous number of platforms * I trust its disassembler (especially for mainstream languages) more than almost any other disassembler * Demangling of Swift names is a nice quality of life improvement, Swift moves fast and is hard to keep up with * Still the best disassembler and machi…

You'd be remiss if you don't mention Binary Ninja[1]. A relative newcomer that's already extremely capable, has great scripting support and is under very active development. [1] https://binary.ninja/

Forgot about them! Folks are really liking it. Affordable too. I have not had time to play with it yet.

Re: IDA: What's new in 7.00

#30

Post by jasode »

systems wrote: post #27
Mahn wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reverse engineering. Basically, if you want to take a compiled binary apart to figure out how it works, IDA is the best tool that there is for that job.

beside curiosity .. and maybe learning what are the common business usage for this, who uses this daily to do his work .. if this use case exist at all for this price, i imagine there must be a very dedicate niche who needs this, who is this niche

>, who is this niche

Programmers working at antivirus companies analyzing malware would be an example. See page 2 of the pdf:

https://www.hex-rays.com/products/ida/ida-executive.pdf

Post reply on HN