The 2024 Hex-Rays IDA Plugin Contest has come to a close, and we are thrilled to announce this year's winners! With an impressive array of 20 submissions, participants showcased innovative solutions to enhance IDA Pro’s functionality. 

After rigorous testing and deliberation, our panel of judges selected the following winners:

• First Prize: hrtng – A feature-rich plugin offering decryption, deobfuscation, patching, and automated control flow unflattening.
• Second Prize: aiDAPal – A locally hosted AI-powered assistant for Hex-Rays pseudocode analysis.
• Third Prize: idalib Rust bindings – High-level Rust bindings for the IDA SDK, enabling seamless standalone tool development.
  

Congratulations to our winners, and a huge thank you to all participants for their hard work and creativity!

Highlights from the Winning Plugins

hrtng impressed our judges with its extensive feature set, including automated control flow unflattening and robust function construction. This tool streamlines reverse engineering workflows with well-integrated functionality and comprehensive documentation. Malware analysts will find these features useful and can be found exclusively in IDA.

aiDAPal introduced an AI-assisted approach to pseudocode analysis, leveraging a fine-tuned large language model to enhance code comprehension and variable renaming. While performance is hardware-dependent, its potential for future AI-driven enhancements is immense.

idalib Rust bindings provided an idiomatic way to interact with IDA’s public API in Rust, facilitating batch processing and standalone analysis. Though still evolving, it presents a promising foundation for Rust-based tooling in IDA Pro.

Other Notable Submissions

Beyond the winners, this year’s contest featured a lineup of plugins addressing a variety of reverse engineering challenges:

• Delphi Helper – Streamlines the analysis of Delphi binaries by parsing RTTI structures and extracting binary resources.
• LabSync – Enables partial synchronization of IDBs among reverse engineers for improved collaboration.
• Graffiti – Enhances IDA’s call graph visualization, aiding navigation and understanding of complex binaries.
• Xrefer – Provides a structured navigation interface with function clustering to accelerate static analysis.
• RevEng.AI – An AI-powered binary analysis platform offering function renaming, packer identification, and vulnerability assessment.
• NavColor – Enhances IDA’s navigation band by visually distinguishing functions with custom colors.
• YaraVM – A processor module and loader enabling disassembly and analysis of compiled Yara rules.

We extend our gratitude to all participants for their ingenuity and dedication. If you’re eager to explore these plugins, visit our plugin repo where we link to their repositories and see how they can enhance your IDA Pro experience.

Stay tuned for future contests, and we look forward to even more groundbreaking innovations next year!

*The 2024 Hex-Rays IDA Plugin Contest winners participated as private individuals, and their submissions were evaluated solely on their merits. Hex-Rays has no business relationship with the winners’ employer. The outcome of this contest does not establish or imply any affiliation between Hex-Rays and the winners’ employer, nor does it constitute an endorsement of their products or services.