ghidra VS cutter

Can an AI agent navigate Ghidra, the NSA’s open-source reverse engineering suite, well enough to hack an Atari game? Ghidra is powerful but notoriously complex, with a steep learning curve. Instead of spending weeks learning its interface, what if I could simply describe my goal and let an AI handle the complexity?

On the command line the `strings` command will list out printable characters in a file (including compiled binaries).

I don't do any systems level programming but found myself down a small rabbit hole of learning about reverse engineering tools. https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra is an open source one. It will show you the assembly code, do its best at giving you a C representation of that code and let you interactively rename variables and symbols to make it more human readable.

Author here. Thanks for sharing this. It seems they released an updated version of this analysis last year [1]. It matches what I saw when analyzing the IPA. I tried to do a deeper analysis on the code itself using several tools, including Google's own bloaty [2] which was not very useful without symbols, classdumpios [3] which revealed something like 50k interfaces starting with "ComGoogle", and Ghidra [4], which I left running for a day to analyze the binary, but kept hanging and freezing so I gave up on it. Perhaps comparing the Android and iOS code could lead to something more fruitful.

[1] https://x.com/emergetools/status/1943060976464728250

[2] https://github.com/google/bloaty

[3] https://github.com/lechium/classdumpios

[4] https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra

Ghidra releases (official zips + checksums): https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra/releases

Thank you for finding this! Depili does great work! In another comment I mentioned that I've been working on the Casio CZ-101, which uses the NEC μPD7810 processor. Depili created a processor spec for the μCOM-87 architecture, which I've continued working on in this PR: https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra/pull/7930

https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra/blob/Ghidra... (Apache 2)

Ghidra also has a debugger, see https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra/blob/master...

- Ghidra Support for 16-bit x86 real mode isn't great, with some bugs requiring significant investment to fix. For example, this issue: https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra/issues/981. I guess no one is willing to invest in that because there is no market.

Rizin[1]/Cutter[2] projects are stored like text files that work well with git, you could try those tools.

[1] https://rizin.re

[2] https://cutter.re

Everything Hiew can do, Rizin[1] can do too, and is completely free and open source[2] under LGPL3 license. Moreover, it supports more architectures, platforms, and file formats, as well as GUI in Qt - Cutter[3][4]. If something is missing in Rizin but presented in Hiew, please let us know by opening the issue with details.

[1] https://rizin.re

[2] https://github.com/rizinorg/rizin

[3] https://cutter.re

[4] https://github.com/rizinorg/cutter

In Cutter[1][2] we have an idea to implement thes same feature[3] as a plugin, but our priorities lie elsewhere die to the lack of enough hands. Contributions are welcome.

[1] https://cutter.re

[2] https://github.com/rizinorg/cutter

[3] https://github.com/rizinorg/cutter-plugins/issues/3

For this kind of task, using low-level debugger tools is probably better. Rizin[1][2]/Cutter[3][4] could help. We also have GSoC participant this year who works hard on improving debuginfo and debugging support[5]. I personally also like Binary Ninja, they recently made their debugger stable enough[6].

[1] https://rizin.re/

[2] https://github.com/rizinorg/rizin

[3] https://cutter.re/

[4] https://github.com/rizinorg/cutter

[5] https://rizin.re/posts/gsoc-2023-announcement/

[5] https://binary.ninja/2023/05/03/3.4-finally-freed.html#debug...

Something like https://cutter.re/ or https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/dll_export_viewer.html Could possibly give you some insight. I guess the question though is, what are you trying to do with it?