Nice! A lot of open source debug tools don't have terribly great UIs and this one looks pretty good. I can't imagine it's as versatile or intelligent as IDA, but on the other hand for the low price of FOSS it is hard to be disappointed. Especially since my hopes of affording a copy of IDA for my hobbyist reverse engineering is basically nil.
This is definitely going in my toolchain of RE apps, alongside x64dbg.
You shouldn't feel bad about buying an (expensive) license if reverse engineering a hobby of yours. Computing is such a cheap hobby it's OK to splurge every once in a while. And there's a good chance the skills you build end up paying dividends later.
Compare computing to other hobbies. Anything involving cars/boats/motorcycles: expensive. Woodworking, metalworking or anything else that requires a shop: way expensive. It's easy to spend thousands upon thousands on most hobbies every year. In contrast with computing you can do almost anything with very basic tools.
It's great when there are high quality free tools out there. But most of the time these free products get abandoned or are left unfinished. It's hard to get a community of volunteers to do the schleppy maintenance work for 20 years when the product is already feature-complete. And that's why we should be glad there are commercial alternatives, even if they're a bit pricey.
It's actually a lot simpler than that: I can't afford it. I don't have the free cash at the moment. I am focused on eliminating debt and increasing savings and I can't do either if I spend some grand on an IDA Pro license.
Maybe you really can't afford it, but given the job opportunities this is a bit like saying that you can't afford college. The cost with all 5 decompilers is about $15,000. That is comparable in cost to a semester of college. It might be a better deal if you bother to really learn the tool.
I guess there aren't student loans for IDA, but there definitely is employment. Once you become competent with IDA, you can apply for jobs like these at my workplace: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19284153 Being competent means you can navigate around in a binary without symbols, that you can mentally convert assembly to C, and generally that you can find things of interest in the binary and understand them.
Binary Ninja (binja) is $149 from Vector35. That might be optimal for you.
I feel you may misunderstand me. I do have a nice comfy job at a big company, in the Bay Area, as a software engineer. My career is still young, so I don't have a ton of savings. I couldn't afford college; I went to a cheaper one, took about a year's worth of classes before my debt became too much higher than my income and gave up. That's a big part of the equation, along with a car loan I still owe a fair bit on. Luckily I found most employers did not care about the lack of a degree and so began my career without much trouble.
I realize someone's probably going to comment that I'm an idiot for living in the Bay Area, but consider this: after living expenses, I still make a fair bit more than I did in Detroit, and I much prefer living here. So it is what it is.
I think in a few years I should be more than capable of buying an IDA Pro license, but as it stands I am not taking on that debt for a hobby. As for whether or not I will get a job doing reverse engineering, I think it's unlikely any time soon, though certainly possible in the future.
That's a lot more context than I feel is necessary to explain why I can't casually drop $3k-5k on a hobby, but hopefully it makes more sense.
That depends on the country. In Germany college costs 300 bucks per semester. I'd bet 90% of students in Germany wouldn't be able to attend if it was more than that. $15,000 is just unbelievably high.
While I don't want to detract from the greatness of FOSS, in the case of IDA, there is also the freeware version, which now has 64bit support, as an option for hobby use.
if i'm reading this right, it looks like $1879 for an individual license of IDA Pro, plus $2629 for each decompiler (a decompiler targets a single OS and architecture). the licenses are perpetual and come with a year of support.
so about $7k just to work with x64 and x86 .exe and .dll files. yikes. but if all you need is disassembly, i guess you're covered with $1879.
oh, wow, i didn't realize i was looking at _just_ the decompiler cost. i've updated my comment, although i'm still not sure if i read the prices correctly.
Suppose you wanted a per-computer license to run on Linux.
IDASTACL is $979, getting you a disassembler for 32-bit only. It is possible to add up to 3 decompilers (ppc, x86, arm) for $2629 each. Getting all of this would be $8866. You can't add the two decompilers for 64-bit architectures.
IDAPROCL is $1879, getting you a disassembler for everything. It is possible to add up to 5 decompilers (ppc, x86, arm, x86-64, arm64) for $2629 each. Getting all of this would be $15024.
For hobby use, Binary Ninja for $149 and Hopper Disassembler for $99 are more reasonable choices.
All of these have demo and/or freeware versions available, with IDA having both. Freeware versions are generally limited to x86 and ARM, without a decompiler. Demo versions are generally limited by being unable to save and by a forced quit after half an hour or so.
Does anyone know why this disassembler might be a good choice over another open source option like Medusa or Radare?
I’m very interested in this stuff. I tried getting into IDA before I had a good understanding of programming and it was a struggle. I have been thinking about trying my hand at it again lately.
I know about Ghidra, the release day is just a coincidence.
There is no problem btw, I have posted here to see if someone was interested to the project.
In any case I will continue to develop REDasm because I use it at work and I need it.
I get "Graph creation failed". I tried to achieve the same thing that can be found on redasm.io. Any ideas why or how to fix? Tried with 2.0 and nightly.
So, I'm on macOS, 64bit, trying to compile with clang, and I get some errors concerning comparisons between size_t and u64 values. I was able to progress a bit by changing some size_t to u64, or the opposite, but I'm quite sure that I'm breaking a bunch of things at the same time :)
I will continue a bit then open an issue with details.
Downloading now. I realize it's not IDA, but does anyone have any preliminary comments on how practical, fast and useful this is for disassembling x86-64 binaries?
Well, it's a personal opinion (and I haven't used Ghidra too much) so:
The UI is a lot 90s/ish and a bit unconfortable to use, but it ships a great decompiler and it can render nice graphs, the quality of the generated listing is good, but inferior compared to IDA's one.
This is definitely going in my toolchain of RE apps, alongside x64dbg.