Year: 2019

climacros – IDA productivity tool

elias IDA Pro, Reverse Engineering

Introduction

A few weeks ago, I proposed an IDA features to improve the CLI and add macros support. After a few email exchanges with Arnaud from Hex-Rays, we could not agree on how to best do it and still accommodate to everyone’s needs. Finally, Arnaud kindly wrote a quick IDAPython script to show me how I can intercept the CLI text before it gets executed. Please see Hack of the day #2: Command-Line Interface helpers.

Unfortunately, the QT approach did not work for me due to many reasons:

  • I don’t want the text to be replaced on the fly.
  • I don’t want the expanded text (macros) to be part of the history. Instead the macros should remain un-expanded as they get stored in the history.

The biggest issue we were discussing is how to format numbers: 0xHEXNUM, HEXNUM, #HEXNUM, …?

How many hardcoded macros should we have and what should they do?

In all cases, since IDA is highly programmable and I have access to the awesome IDA support team (thank you guys!), the ball is now in my court and all I had to do is write a plugin.

Enter ‘climacros’

I woke up one day with the solution to this dilemma. I don’t have to hardcode anything, instead just let the users define their own macros backed by Python expressions. The only thing I hardcoded was how to embed an expression in the CLI text. I opted for something simple inspired by the PHP/ASP syntax, something like ${ expression }$ (anything between those special tags is evaluated in Python).

With this basic idea, I set about implementing all the default macros that I think are useful for my daily work with WinDbg’s CLI.

This is climacros in action:

No more copy/paste in order to get the current address from the disassembly view! 🙂

climacros is written in C++ and is opensource. You can also grab the Windows binaries from here.

Future work

If this plugin is well received, I think people will ask for features like:

  • Macros profiles: to have a set of macros that one can switch between them quickly
  • Import/Export macros: to be able to transfer macros with users
  • Macro expansion using a scripting language of your choice and not just Python

Let me know!

 

QScripts – IDA Scripting productivity tool

elias IDA Pro, Reverse Engineering

Just a quick post to introduce QScripts. QScripts is a productivity tool that helps IDA users speed up their scripts development. The idea for QScripts sprang from my autox script that I wrote for the Batchography book.

With QScripts, you will be able to develop your scripts in your favorite text editor, save the script and see the results in IDA. Therefore, it makes sense to resize IDA and the text editor to see things side by side.

Please grab your copy from here.

Daenerys: IDA Pro and Ghidra interoperability framework

elias Ghidra, Reverse Engineering

Ghidra has only been released for a short while and the RCE community started adopting it (scripts, tutorials, articles, etc.) really quick. Since Ghidra is free and open-source (coming soon™), I expect a torrent of contributions in the form of tools, plugins and scripts.

I think it is important not to create a schism between IDA users and new Ghidra users because that will not benefit the RCE community. For that reason, I think it would be cool to have a simple way to seamlessly run scripts between the two SRE frameworks.

Today I introduce the Daenerys framework that lets you run IDA scripts in Ghidra and vice versa. Since I am a long term IDA user, it is easier for me to start writing the IDA-to-Ghidra adapters first. As time goes by, I will become more familiar with Ghidra’s APIs and will be able to write the adapters that let users run Ghidra scripts seamlessly in IDA as well.

If you have watched the Game of Thrones show, you are perhaps familiar with Daenerys Targaryen (aka “The mother of dragons”). I chose her name for this project because IDA’s logo is represented by a certain medieval lady and Ghidra by a dragon (some say from the GodZilla lore / King Ghidorah). Having the Daenerys framework’s logo as a lady and a dragon standing on equal footing represents a harmonious relationship between the two.

If you are a graphics designers, I would appreciate it if you can create a logo for the framework better than the one I found using Bing.com’s public domain image search.

The Daenerys framework is still in its infancy and your contributions/suggestions are welcome.

Finally, I hope the RCE community continues to strive and becomes more accessible to everyone interested in the field.

Ghidra: A quick overview for the curious

elias IDA Pro

Ghidra, is a software reverse engineering (SRE) suite of tools developed by NSA’s Research Directorate in support of the Cybersecurity mission. It was released recently and I became curious about it and wanted to check it out.

I have not researched to see if someone else did a similar overview article or not, however, I am writing this article for myself and those who don’t want to run Ghidra themselves and just want to learn a bit about it.

I know that it is unfair to compare Ghidra to IDA Pro, but I cannot help it: I am a long time user of IDA Pro and it is my only point of reference when it comes to reverse engineering tools.

This article is going to be long and will contain lots of screenshots. I just started playing with Ghidra and therefore, I might be wrong or might be presenting inaccurate or incomplete information so please excuse me ahead of time.

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