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IDA: What's new in 7.00

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Re: IDA: What's new in 7.00

#31

Post by ihalip »

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

Malware analysis, binary patching, research, bounty hunting, developing cheats, etc etc etc. There are a lot of use cases.

Re: IDA: What's new in 7.00

#32

Post by captainmuon »

blibble wrote: post #11
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.

that would seem to be a extremely stupid way of converting hobbyists into paying commercial users

Especially since there is no way I'm buying this as a hobbyist. I'd like to have it, but I don't need it and can't afford it - so I either pirate it or won't use it.

If I got access, by pirating, or having a free / subsidized / university version, I might be able to develop my skills such that I can use this professionally, and would certainly be able to buy a license (and ongoing support).

But like this, the only way I could "get into" IDA Pro is by using it at a company where the bought a license.

Also, the developers should really release a new demo/evaluation version, supporting 64 bit.

Re: IDA: What's new in 7.00

#33

Post by ktta »

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…

There's also Capstone, which is open source

http://www.capstone-engine.org/

https://github.com/aquynh/capstone

Re: IDA: What's new in 7.00

#34

Post by pag »

endorphone wrote: post #25

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.

McSema developer here. We have a few success stories with it, including lifting, instrumenting, and recompiling Apache web server. It has also been used for symbolic execution of various programs. We at Trail of Bits are working on version 2 of McSema (currently in the use_remill_semantics branch) and we hope to have that released in the coming months.

Re: IDA: What's new in 7.00

#35

Post by bathory »

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.

with a certain regularity ida pro versions leak, because companies who purchased ida pro get hacked. sometimes these ida pro versions are only available to a select few (the hacking crew, their friends etc.) but sometimes even those versions get leaked.

Re: IDA: What's new in 7.00

#36

Post by khedoros1 »

captainmuon wrote: post #32
blibble wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that would seem to be a extremely stupid way of converting hobbyists into paying commercial users

Especially since there is no way I'm buying this as a hobbyist. I'd like to have it, but I don't need it and can't afford it - so I either pirate it or won't use it. If I got access, by pirating, or having a free / subsidized / university version, I might be able to develop my skills such that I can use this professionally, and would certainly be able to buy a license (and ongoing support). But like this, the only wa…

> But like this, the only way I could "get into" IDA Pro is by using it at a company where the bought a license.

Or use the older, free version, which would be enough to develop some skills and become familiar with the general operation of the program.

Re: IDA: What's new in 7.00

#37

Post by tacoman »

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

I use a similar application to reverse binaries of proprietary software we legally purchase and use. The vendor is sometimes unable or unwilling to document how something actually works or how something could work if it was configured in a certain way.

Re: IDA: What's new in 7.00

#38

Post by _xhok »

tptacek wrote: post #23
utku_karatas2 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

That's fascinating. I'd lumped IDA in with e.g. Photoshop. Was wrong.

Did they ever retract their public freaking out?

Re: IDA: What's new in 7.00

#39

Post by AceJohnny2 »

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…

> I trust its disassembler (especially for mainstream languages) more than almost any other disassembler

Might I suggest Christopher Domas' Black Hat talk "Breaking the x86 ISA", along the way of which he demonstrates the limitations of all disassemblers out there, including IDA's :)

Talk: https://youtu.be/KrksBdWcZgQ

Slides: https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-17/thursday/us-17-Domas-Bre...

Paper: https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-17/thursday/us-17-Domas-Bre...

Re: IDA: What's new in 7.00

#40

Post by problems »

adamnemecek wrote: post #7
_xhok wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's expected that hobbyists will pirate it.

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.

It's not people who have previously pirated it - it's people who have intentionally leaked their copy to crackers.
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