State-of-the-art binary code analysis tools
When analyzing firmware binaries, a proper memory layout is quite important. When loading a raw binary, IDA usually creates a code segment for the whole binary. This is good enough when that code is all you need to analyze, but it is not always the case. For example, the code can refer to external […]
This is a guest entry written by Baptiste Verstraeten from the Thalium Team. His views and opinions are his own and not those of Hex-Rays. Any technical or maintenance issues regarding the code herein should be directed to the author. The Symless plugin aims to simplify the process of retrieving and defining structures, classes, and virtual […]
IDA supports different representations for the instruction operands and data items. However, only the most common of them are listed in the context menu or have hotkeys assigned. Let’s imagine that you’ve discovered an area in a firmware binary which looks like a table of floating-point values: You can confirm that it looks plausible by […]
Let’s consider this snippet from decompilation of an x86 Windows binary: The same function is called twice with the same argument and the last one doesn’t seem to use the result of the GetComputerNameExW call. By switching to disassembly, we can see that eax is initialized before each call with a string address: However the decompiler does not […]
The Functions list is probably the most known and used part of IDA’s default desktop layout. It includes all detected functions in the current database and offers a quick way to find and navigate to any of them. However, the database consists not only of functions but also data items or instructions which are […]
Let’s say you found a promising-looking string in the binary, followed the cross reference to the function using it, then decompiled it to see how the string is used, only to see no signs of it in the pseudocode. What’s happening? In such situation it often helps to set up two synchronized disassembly<->pseudocode views and […]
As covered before, the action “Create struct from selection” can be used to quickly create structures from existing data items. However, Disassembly view not the only place where it can be used. For example, let’s imagine you’ve created a structure to represent some context used by the binary being analyzed: 00000000 Context […]
This is a guest entry written by Sergejs Harlamovs from IKARUS Security Software GmbH. His views and opinions are his own and not those of Hex-Rays. Any technical or maintenance issues regarding the code herein should be directed to the author. IdaClu: Finding clues without knowing what to seek IdaClu, as the name suggests, is about […]
In order to faithfully represent the behavior of the code and to conform to the rules of the C language, the decompiler may need to add casts in the pseudocode. A few examples: a variable has been detected to be unsigned but participates in a signed comparison: An argument being passed to a function does not match […]
In order to show the user only the most relevant code and hide the unnecessary clutter, the decompiler performs various optimizations before displaying the pseudocode. Some of these optimizations rely on various assumptions which are usually correct in well-behaved programs. However, in some situations they may be incorrect which may lead to wrong output, so […]