leave it to a three letter agency to use a pre-existing acronym for something pretty different
Ghidra by NSA
201–210 of 231 posts
Re: Ghidra by NSA
#202Binary Ninja deserves a mention in these threads: https://binary.ninja I've used IDA, Ghidra, and Binary Ninja a lot over the years. At this point I much prefer Binary Ninja for the task of building up an understanding of large binaries with many thousands of types and functions. It also doesn't hurt that its UI/UX feel like something out of this century, and it's very easy to automate using Python scripts.
Yep, it's cheaper than IDA and I like the UI better. Also I love that it's made by game hacking folks (my clique).
I believe the Binja folk originate from the CTF folk.
Re: Ghidra by NSA
#203While on the topic, I want to highlight two incredible plugins for Ghidra: https://github.com/jtang613/GhidrAssist And https://github.com/jtang613/GhidrAssistMCP Being able to hook Claude code up to this has made reversing way more productive. Highly recommend!
Hopefully this will help decompilation projects into generating better pseudocode. Some sort of "generate code -> build and execute -> test against existing executable if it behaves like the original -> change code again" loop.
Re: Ghidra by NSA
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
Binary Ninja seems way ahead in terms of UX, as a hobby reverser. It's my default as well.
It's basically "VS Code" UX with dark mode. Come on, is this some sort of joke? Serious question.
Last time I used them - Ghidra, and to some extent IDA, had UXes that were very difficult for new users to pick up and frequently deviate from standard expectations for modern desktop apps because they have two decades of baggage. In contrast binary ninja is very easy to explore and has many fewer surprises.
Re: Ghidra by NSA
#205Binary Ninja deserves a mention in these threads: https://binary.ninja I've used IDA, Ghidra, and Binary Ninja a lot over the years. At this point I much prefer Binary Ninja for the task of building up an understanding of large binaries with many thousands of types and functions. It also doesn't hurt that its UI/UX feel like something out of this century, and it's very easy to automate using Python scripts.
The Linux free trial version is a 400MB .zip file including a 255.2MB "binaryninja" shared binary https://github.com/Vector35/binaryninja-api/releases/downloa...
i've heard there is a way to get the source code for free
Re: Ghidra by NSA
#206Since we’re talking about decompilers, might as well mention the community around the research area: http://decompilation.wiki/ As well as the research history (slated to be updated in a few days): https://mahaloz.re/dec-progress-2024
Agh I really wish these awesome community wikis would be easier to find when you don't know about them, they usually have such a cool trove of information. The one I love quite I love is the OSDev Forums Wiki, though that one is well known and loved by a lot of people in the space. We really need to protect these projects somehow, more and more stuff and expertise is getting hidden in Discord servers, completely unsearchable and locked away within the minds of the members...
Re: Ghidra by NSA
#207I miss the analog of this community from the 90s. We had actual principles and ethos and wouldn’t have been caught dead upvoting and using software from the frickin NSA. Not that it’s any surprise here. Contemporary San Francisco driven software culture which is the majority represented on this forum have no qualms with FAANG ethics, open source is not really important either. Oh I’m sorry the NSA didn’t spy on the w…
Having been in Seattle, I’m not sure there was a time the NSA wasn’t involved with technology — eg, UW hosted meetups between researchers, criminals, and the government at least that long. Who built the Echelon follow-up, proto-dragnet system that provided the framework for the spying you bemoan? — the one extended and taken live in the early 2000s? Those same 90s hackers you glorify.
> provided the framework for the spying you bemoan
The community I’m talking about definitely weren’t like secretly building tools for these agencies. I mean this sincerely I have no idea what point you’re making. The agencies existed and made tech so by logical necessity people worked there. I didn’t say all people in computing.
There was a prevalent community of programmers and hackers who understood what these organizations represented and would never be on a forum blithely talking about some tool they made as if it was acceptable. Shame on anyone using these tools and the lack of objection to this post is a metric of how disgusting computing culture and really this forum are.
Re: Ghidra by NSA
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
> People are really attracted to using LLMs on deep thinking tasks, off shoring their thinking, to a "Think for me SaaS". This won't end well for you, there's no shortcuts in life that don't come with a (huge) cost. I, too, watched The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. The problem is that I, too, shipped a fuckton of working, reviewed, reworked, tests-and-lint-passing, properly-typed code implementing brand new features from sc…
I actually have zero clue what Sorcerer's apprentice is, or what you're getting at. I never said that it isn't useful for dumb tedious tasks that don't require much thought. I was talking about critical tasks where human nuance is important, just because an LLM can produce a result, does not mean that the result is great. Not everything people work on are "features" delivered via http handlers. I don't understand thi…
None of it is product. It’s all personal free software that I’ve designed over many years that I didn’t have time to implement before.
No KPIs, just useful tools for myself and anyone else who finds them valuable.
Re: Ghidra by NSA
#209Do you think they use these tools in China or somethiing elsee?
Re: Ghidra by NSA
#210I guarantee that a million eyes have been all over this looking for the Super Sekrit Government Backdoors, too.
If it was mine, I'd stick in a heavily-obfuscated bit of code for people to use Ghidra to reverse-engineer Ghidra to find out what it did.
OMG, it's a keylogger! But it's not activated by default! How does it get activated? How does it emit its logs?
And after weeks of poking they find you run it with "$ ACTIVATE_KEYLOGGER=true ghidra", and it saves to "$HOME/Desktop/ghidra_key_log.txt"
Haha, psych!