State-of-the-art binary code analysis tools
It is a nice feeling, when, after long debugging nights, your software finally runs and produces meaningful results. Another hallmark is when other users start to use it and obtain useful results. Usually this period is very busy: lots of new bugs are discovered and fixed, unforeseen corner cases are handled. Then another period starts: when users come back for […]
Just a short post to show you the current state of the x64 decompiler. In fact, it already mostly works but we still have to solve some minor problems. Let us consider this source code: struct color_t { short red; short green; short blue; short alpha; }; extern color_t lighten(color_t c); color_t func(int red, int green, […]
Last week we released IDA 6.2 and Hex-Rays Decompiler 1.6. Many of the new IDA features have been described in previous posts, but there have been notable additions in the decompiler as well. They will let you make the decompilation cleaner and closer to the original source. However, it might be not very obvious how […]
Last month I visited the Recon conference and had a great time again. I gave a talk on C++ decompilation and how to handle it in IDA and Hex-Rays decompiler. You can get the slides here, and download the recorded talk here. Edit: for some reason the streaming version does […]
We have the beta version of the ARM decompiler almost ready! Below is a short demo of how it works now: Your browser does not support the video element. Kindly update it to latest version. If you are interested in participating in the beta testing and you have an […]
As everyone knows, Google and some other companies were under a targeted attack a few days ago. A vulnerability in the Internet Explorer was used to penetrate the computers. An IDA user very kindly sent us the following link http://www.avertlabs.com/research/blog/index.php/2010/01/18/an-insight-into-the-aurora-communication-protocol/
The Hex-Rays Decompiler 1.0 was released more than two years ago. Since then it has improved a lot and does a great job decompiling real-life code, but sometimes there are additional things that you might wish to do with its output. For that purpose we have released the Hex-Rays Decompiler SDK and several sample plugins. However, […]
The last week Elias ran a sample malware in the Bochs emulator and I was curious to see what it exactly does. So I took the unpacked version of the malware and fed it into the decompiler. It turned out to be a pretty short downloadler (different AV vendors give it different names: Lighty […]
The idea to use BITS to download files from the internet is not new. If you check the corresponding page from Wikipedia, you will find that Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) is a component of modern Microsoft Windows operating systems that facilitates prioritized, throttled, and asynchronous transfer of files between machines using idle network bandwidth. The […]
The decompiler makes some assumptions about the input code. Like that call instructions usually return, the memory model is flat, the function frame is set properly, etc. When these assumptions are correct, the output is good. When they are wrong, well, the output does not correspond to the input. Take, for example, the following snippet: The […]