e9patch VS pharos

E9AFL uses E9Patch (https://github.com/GJDuck/e9patch) to insert the AFL instrumentation via static binary rewriting.

E9Patch - a scalable static binary rewriting tool for x86_64 Linux ELF binaries - https://github.com/GJDuck/e9patch

OOAnalyzer is wonderful for recovering class/function information C++ that makes manual vtable/RTTI perusing relatively moot. I ultimately installed it along with the rest of Pharos on Linux and it was a couple days of figuring before I got things running.

Something that could be viable is e.g. learning the heuristics in a tool like https://github.com/cmu-sei/pharos instead of hand-crafting them. More coarse information like function partitioning, is this function a constructor etc.

That's why I eventually started looking for a more automated approach like https://github.com/cmu-sei/pharos.

I recently started analysing a game with Ghidra. I found the plugin mentioned was actually fairly useless in my case (but this was version 9, maybe things have changed), instead I used OOAnalyzer [1] and its associated Ghidra plugin - great for bootstrapping a class hierarchy, which is otherwise extremely tedious to do. It took 24 hours and ~100GB of memory, so I ran it on AWS, splitting the analysis in parts according to [2]. Also I’d recommend looking into scripting, it can save you a lot of time in repetitive scenarios.

[1] https://github.com/cmu-sei/pharos/blob/master/tools/ooanalyz...

There's no reason to be alarmed just because you've been running for 14 hours and using 11gb of ram. But you should make sure you're not running out of ram. You should also absolutely be following the step-by-step guide which you already found. You don't want to have to restart from scratch if something goes wrong.