MCP server for Ghidra • Hacker News Board

Re: MCP server for Ghidra

#61

Post by lucianbr » Thu, Mar 27, 2025, 1:13 PM UTC

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #51

dragonwriter wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs process information in a strictly sequential manner. "LLMs" as a class do not. Most LLMs, because most LLMs are autoregressive models, but diffusion LLMs exist and are not sequential in the way that autoregressive models are. > It's their core capability Being sequential is not a capability at all, much less a core one defining Large Language Models. > and what makes them feel so anthropomorphic. I disagree wi…

The gimmick of the LLM is that it outputs text sequentially, as if it is talking to us. That's what makes them feel "alive" and "intelligent" to us. (And yes, ironically it's this sequential nature that actually limits their intelligence in practice, but whatever. The AI hype is about appearances, not facts.)

> That's what makes them feel "alive" and "intelligent" to us.

What is the basis for this claim? Seems like "A" (chatbots output text sequentially) is true, and "B" (they feel intelligent to us) is true, and you're claiming "A causes B" without any support at all. Just because they happen to both be true and you personally feel there is a causal relationship, which proves nothing.

Re: MCP server for Ghidra

#62

Post by pilooch » Thu, Mar 27, 2025, 2:03 PM UTC

Xx_crazy420_xX wrote: post #42

For LLMs to solve code I think they should be AST-native. Code is a tree, not a sequence — yet we feed it to models linearly, with no explicit structure. Todays models lack recurrence or true memory, so they can’t reason over hierarchical structures effectively.

Or just we could forget about code and have model act directly :) That's my bet.

Re: MCP server for Ghidra

#63

Post by gosub100 » Thu, Mar 27, 2025, 2:35 PM UTC

ngneer wrote: post #26

Thought experiment. Suppose all binaries could be instantly reverse engineered to perfection. How would that change security?

Secure enclaves would appear in most computers. Nothing would be run without everything being encrypted.

Re: MCP server for Ghidra

#64

Post by airza » Thu, Mar 27, 2025, 3:15 PM UTC

randomtoast wrote: post #60

I hope that one day we have a tool that can convert any proprietary binary to source code with a single click. It would be so much fun to have an "open source" version of all games. Currently, there are projects like https://github.com/Try/OpenGothic and https://github.com/SFTtech/openage , but these require years of community effort.

Current SOTA models are really bad at RE and i don't really expect this to improve through training on open data.

There are just not a lot of high quality examples on the internet, and more importantly the people writing this code are doing their best to make it actively more difficult.

Re: MCP server for Ghidra

#65

Post by gus_massa » Thu, Mar 27, 2025, 3:26 PM UTC

randomtoast wrote: post #60

I hope that one day we have a tool that can convert any proprietary binary to source code with a single click. It would be so much fun to have an "open source" version of all games. Currently, there are projects like https://github.com/Try/OpenGothic and https://github.com/SFTtech/openage , but these require years of community effort.

You can't open source code that is not yours. They are implementing a clean new version.

On the other direction, a company can't pick a GPL project, uncompile the code and release it as proprietary.

Re: MCP server for Ghidra

#66

Post by randomtoast » Thu, Mar 27, 2025, 3:41 PM UTC

gus_massa wrote: post #65

randomtoast wrote: post #60

I hope that one day we have a tool that can convert any proprietary binary to source code with a single click. It would be so much fun to have an "open source" version of all games. Currently, there are projects like https://github.com/Try/OpenGothic and https://github.com/SFTtech/openage , but these require years of community effort.

You can't open source code that is not yours. They are implementing a clean new version. On the other direction, a company can't pick a GPL project, uncompile the code and release it as proprietary.

> They are implementing a clean new version.

Much of reverse engineering involves analyzing existing code, and this is not a secret. There are forums where people discuss and share their reverse engineering findings. Without this, creating a nearly 100% compatible clone, such as one that can use the original game files, would be nearly impossible.

Re: MCP server for Ghidra

#67

Post by sebzim4500 » Thu, Mar 27, 2025, 4:13 PM UTC

airza wrote: post #64

randomtoast wrote: post #60

I hope that one day we have a tool that can convert any proprietary binary to source code with a single click. It would be so much fun to have an "open source" version of all games. Currently, there are projects like https://github.com/Try/OpenGothic and https://github.com/SFTtech/openage , but these require years of community effort.

Current SOTA models are really bad at RE and i don't really expect this to improve through training on open data. There are just not a lot of high quality examples on the internet, and more importantly the people writing this code are doing their best to make it actively more difficult.

It is quite easy to produce high quality synthetic data to train reverse engineering. Just take any open source project and ask the model to produce the code (or something equivalent) given the binary.

Re: MCP server for Ghidra

#68

Post by lmeyerov » Thu, Mar 27, 2025, 4:40 PM UTC

Xx_crazy420_xX wrote: post #42

For LLMs to solve code I think they should be AST-native. Code is a tree, not a sequence — yet we feed it to models linearly, with no explicit structure. Todays models lack recurrence or true memory, so they can’t reason over hierarchical structures effectively.

The graph part , more so than the ast part, makes sense to me. We reason over programs as hairy dataflow/controlflow/etc dependency graphs that happen to originally be encoded as some sort of text->ast.

GNNs went down some roads here, but never felt like a path to reasoning. So how to get an RL reasoner flow to do what is easy for datalog, natively and/or as a tool?

Re: MCP server for Ghidra

#69

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Mar 27, 2025, 5:48 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #45

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs process information in a strictly sequential manner. It's their core capability and what makes them feel so anthropomorphic.

> LLMs process information in a strictly sequential manner. "LLMs" as a class do not. Most LLMs, because most LLMs are autoregressive models, but diffusion LLMs exist and are not sequential in the way that autoregressive models are. > It's their core capability Being sequential is not a capability at all, much less a core one defining Large Language Models. > and what makes them feel so anthropomorphic. I disagree wi…

[deleted]

Re: MCP server for Ghidra

#70

Post by ai-christianson » Thu, Mar 27, 2025, 5:49 PM UTC

sebzim4500 wrote: post #67

airza wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Current SOTA models are really bad at RE and i don't really expect this to improve through training on open data. There are just not a lot of high quality examples on the internet, and more importantly the people writing this code are doing their best to make it actively more difficult.

It is quite easy to produce high quality synthetic data to train reverse engineering. Just take any open source project and ask the model to produce the code (or something equivalent) given the binary.

Right. You could even run it through code obfuscators and such to create more diverse, realistic examples.