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Ghidra by NSA

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211–220 of 231 posts

Re: Ghidra by NSA

#211
post #44

Binary 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.

Not sure why you would use Binary Ninja free version, there are so many limitations, like IDA free the platform support is very low.

Re: Ghidra by NSA

#212
post #200
post #71

Earlier 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.

I'm curious what you would consider better UX?

We have actually been more inspired by Jetbrains lately than VS Code. Take that for what you will.

We do try to pick simple sane defaults while still allowing enough customization to adapt to different workflows.

Actually working on a startup wizard for first time users if they want to more closely replicate the feel of other RE tools since muscle memory is hard to break.

Re: Ghidra by NSA

#213
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easily one of the coolest RE projects out there, I've always looked on in awe. > The relocation table synthesizer analyzer relies on a fully populated Ghidra database (with correctly declared symbols, data types and references) in order to work It's a shame that this requirement exists (I am well aware that it's a functional necessity), because all the stuff I want to relink is far too big to make a full db!

You only need a full DB if you want to fully delink your artifact. You can just clean up the subset you're interested in exporting (the fully populated disclaimer is just there because there's a lot you can get away with, as long as you know precisely what you are doing). Even then, a full DB is quite achievable, even on large projects. The biggest public project using ghidra-delinker-extension out there is the FUEL…

Whoah, that is super impressive. My target binary is 9MiB, seemingly only 10k relocations IIRC but 37k functions.

I might try a partial delink and see how it goes!

Re: Ghidra by NSA

#215

I 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…

do please share your "ethical" software stack that doesn't include contributions from "unethical" sources involved in spying, wars, human rights violations, etc

what sort of device did you type this comment from?

Re: Ghidra by NSA

#216
post #20

Taking the opportunity to ask: are there nice recommended resources for a beginner to start with reverse engineering (ideally using Ghidra)? Let's say for an experienced developer, but not so experienced in reverse engineering? I guess one issue I have is that I don't have good ideas of fun projects, and that's probably something I need to actually get the motivation to learn. I can find a "hello world", that's easy,…

See if there is an OTA package available for your speaker that you can extract and figure out what goes where.

Then figure out what SoC your smart speaker is running.

A lot of soc vendors just provide SDKs for IoT applications. Maybe you'll find something like that you can flash.

Also if there's a separate SPI flash chip, you can simply dump it and study the firmware.

Re: Ghidra by NSA

#217
post #20

Taking the opportunity to ask: are there nice recommended resources for a beginner to start with reverse engineering (ideally using Ghidra)? Let's say for an experienced developer, but not so experienced in reverse engineering? I guess one issue I have is that I don't have good ideas of fun projects, and that's probably something I need to actually get the motivation to learn. I can find a "hello world", that's easy,…

Allow me to shamelessly plug my blog, I have been (very slowly!) re-visiting microcorruption and writing up the solutions in a tutorial-esque fashion. https://lovesexsecretgod.com

Nice.

Re: Ghidra by NSA

#218

How do they incentivize government employees into doing such excellent work without paying them a real tech salary?

$160k-$170k is not a bad salary; in some cases they get $250k, but sure, it's not a FAANG type.

Most folks in government service are making significantly less than that. That's midrange GS-15 pay.

Re: Ghidra by NSA

#220
post #44

Binary 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...

Source code:

https://codeload.github.com/Vector35/binaryninja-api/tar.gz/...

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