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Ghidra, NSA's reverse-engineering tool

nsa.gov

21–30 of 425 posts

Re: Ghidra, NSA's reverse-engineering tool

#21
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad actors have been using IDA this entire time. So no, not really.

You mean there is nothing new here? Then why is this news? I am not wondering about the concept of reverse engineering but the specific (and hopefully novel) feature set that this may enable.

Conceptually there's nothing new, but it doesn't hurt to have more options available, especially considering how pricey IDA is.

Re: Ghidra, NSA's reverse-engineering tool

#22
post #11

I am going to sound pessimistic here, but isn't there a real danger of having this technology available to bad actors and is there any value to keeping such things confidential if it plays a role in national security? If someone was releasing malicious software to hijack the power grid as an example, wouldn't they be first able to use this to try to improve the robustness and invisibility of their attack ? Or is the…

Not at all,this helps analyze malware not create it. There is no security obtained by preventing reverse engineering of a binary. If anything this makes adversaries ability to hide their methodoligies harder,a strategic advantage for someone like the US government.

Re: Ghidra, NSA's reverse-engineering tool

#23
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad actors have been using IDA this entire time. So no, not really.

You mean there is nothing new here? Then why is this news? I am not wondering about the concept of reverse engineering but the specific (and hopefully novel) feature set that this may enable.

There are more options in the universe of reactions than "Eek! They're going to get us all killed!" and "Eh?"

Re: Ghidra, NSA's reverse-engineering tool

#24
post #11

I am going to sound pessimistic here, but isn't there a real danger of having this technology available to bad actors and is there any value to keeping such things confidential if it plays a role in national security? If someone was releasing malicious software to hijack the power grid as an example, wouldn't they be first able to use this to try to improve the robustness and invisibility of their attack ? Or is the…

The general philosophy in computer security is that bad actors will be using the tools they need to use anyway, and the world is actually more secure if the best tools to use are widely available, since the security professionals in charge of defending systems are trained on their use, and can better anticipate an attacker's methods. Even better if they're open source, so that they're easily analyzable, and the barrier for training is lowered.

Re: Ghidra, NSA's reverse-engineering tool

#25
post #11

I am going to sound pessimistic here, but isn't there a real danger of having this technology available to bad actors and is there any value to keeping such things confidential if it plays a role in national security? If someone was releasing malicious software to hijack the power grid as an example, wouldn't they be first able to use this to try to improve the robustness and invisibility of their attack ? Or is the…

Bad actors have been using IDA this entire time. So no, not really.

Bad actors have had access to this tool too... it was leaked previously.

This is cool because:

- It's legal and free - It's open source

Re: Ghidra, NSA's reverse-engineering tool

#26
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean there is nothing new here? Then why is this news? I am not wondering about the concept of reverse engineering but the specific (and hopefully novel) feature set that this may enable.

It's a competitor to IDA's monopoly, basically. It might be better in certain aspects.

IDA has a bunch of competitors --- Hopper, Binja, and all the Capstone interfaces.

Re: Ghidra, NSA's reverse-engineering tool

#28

Download: https://ghidra-sre.org/ GitHub: https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra

Download from the NSA without open source software... anyone else virtualizing three layers deep to get to this?

AFAICT all the source is there, beside every `.jar` there is a `.zip` with the corresponding source. The source in a more usable form should be posted here soon: https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra/

(And if not I'm sure the community will reconstitute it)

Re: Ghidra, NSA's reverse-engineering tool

#29
post #6

It appears that it isn't actually available as of now. Apparently, the NSA is going to release it at RSA Conference 2019, so it'll probably actually be published within the next couple of days.

The RSA conference is currently ongoing and the NSA talk was today. Actually, it should be over just about now.

Re: Ghidra, NSA's reverse-engineering tool

#30
Why this is important (for those uninitiated):

- Ghidra is basically the first real competitor to IDA Pro, the extremely expensive and often pirated state-of-the-art software for reverse engineering. Nothing else has come close to IDA Pro.

- Ghidra is open-source, IDA Pro is not.

- Ghidra has a lot of really cool features that IDA Pro doesn't, such as decompiling binaries to pseudo-C code.

- It's also collaborative, which is interesting because multiple people can reverse engineer the same binary at the same time -- something IDA only got VERY recently.

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