Announcing the 2025 Plugin Contest Winners

The 2025 Hex-Rays IDA Plugin Contest is officially wrapped up, and we are excited to announce this year's winners! This edition drew 25 submissions from both returning participants and newcomers, each bringing fresh ideas to extend and improve IDA Pro. 

All plugins are available to explore on plugins.hex-rays.com and installable via the HCLI command-line tool. After thorough testing and deliberation, our judges selected the following winners.

• First Prize: iOSHelper – A wide-ranging toolkit for reverse-engineering Apple platform binaries, featuring customized code rendering and microcode-level transformations.
• Second Prize: BinSync – A collaborative reverse-engineering tool that synchronizes annotations across users and disassemblers via a git-backed storage model.
• Third Prize: CrystalRE – Reverse-engineering support for Crystal language binaries, with automatic demangling, type recovery, and runtime-structure identification.

Congratulations to all three teams, and a huge thank you to all participants for their hard work and creativity! For the full contest results and winner announcements, check out the 2025 Plugin Contest page.

Highlights from the Winning Plugins

iOSHelper

Yoav Sternberg — https://plugins.hex-rays.com/yoavst/ida-ios-helper/iOSHelper

hcli plugin install iOSHelper

iOSHelper is a wide-ranging toolkit aimed at reverse-engineering Apple platform binaries. It customizes the way IDA renders code, applies a number of microcode-level transformations that produce cleaner pseudocode for common Apple idioms, and bundles together small workflow improvements that meaningfully streamline day-to-day vulnerability research on iOS targets.

What makes iOSHelper stand out is the coherence of its feature set: everything is designed around a real, common workflow rather than a loose collection of utilities. The plugin demonstrates strong command of the IDA Python SDK, making confident use of capabilities like customized code rendering and microcode manipulation that are genuinely difficult to get right. The project is also actively maintained, with 188 commits, 132 stars, and 14 forks, and the codebase itself is concise and well-commented. We recommend iOSHelper to anyone who regularly works with Apple platform binaries.

BinSync

Zion Leonahenahe Basque (mahaloz), the angr team, and the SEFCOM Lab at Arizona State University — https://plugins.hex-rays.com/binsync/binsync/BinSync

hcli plugin install BinSync

BinSync is a collaborative reverse-engineering tool that synchronizes annotations between users working on the same binary, including names, types, comments, and prototypes. Built on a git-backed storage model and a cross-tool abstraction layer called LibBS, it lets teams coordinate around a sample regardless of whether each member is working in IDA, Ghidra, or Binary Ninja.

BinSync is a substantial open-source project with deep roots in the academic and CTF community, backed by 563 commits, 691 stars, 53 forks, and 38 contributors. The design is thoughtful, the code quality is very good, and the recently added idalib mode hints at a future where BinSync fits naturally into automated analysis pipelines. We expect it to remain an active and valuable tool well into the coming year.

CrystalRE

Nico Posada — https://plugins.hex-rays.com/nico-posada/crystalre/CrystalRE

hcli plugin install CrystalRE

CrystalRE targets a niche but technically rich problem: reverse-engineering binaries produced by the Crystal programming language. Beyond symbol demangling, it registers a custom __crystal calling convention, walks the ctree, responds to Hex-Rays events, and applies non-trivial structure manipulation to recover Crystal's runtime layout.

CrystalRE goes well beyond a simple symbol prettifier. Registering a custom calling convention, walking the ctree, hooking into Hex-Rays events, and performing structural recovery are each independently non-trivial, and CrystalRE is one of the few public examples that brings all of them together in a single plugin. It is an excellent reminder that IDA is open to deep, file-class-specific customization.

Honorable Mentions

Several other submissions stood out and are worth highlighting for specific audiences:

• HappyIDA – A set of convenience utilities for the Hex-Rays decompiler: Swift-style function-parameter labeling, clipboard helpers, visual SEH try/catch block reconstruction, vtable navigation, a Rust string prettifier, and copy-address enhancements.
• EmuIt – An easy-to-use IDA Pro emulator plugin built on Unicorn, exposing both a UI and programmatic access.
• Sharingan – Assists with deobfuscation and string/data decryption through a drag-and-drop recipe workflow, with toggleable modules and before/after highlighting.
• Yarka – A dependency-free YARA rule generator: select instructions, strings, or binary data and produce a clean signature.

A big thank you to everyone who participated, the creativity and effort on display this year were truly impressive. Curious to see what the community built? Head over to the plugin repository to browse all 25 submissions and try them out via the HCLI command-line tool.

For the full contest results and winner announcements, check out the 2025 Plugin Contest page.

We can't wait to see what next year's contest brings!

*The winners of the 2025 Hex-Rays IDA Plugin Contest participated as private individuals, and their submissions were evaluated solely on their merits. The outcome of this contest does not establish or imply any affiliation between Hex-Rays and the winners' employers or affiliated organizations, nor does it constitute an endorsement of any related products or services.