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Show HN: REDasm Disassembler 2.0
- eggy 8y agoDownloading 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?
- Dax89 8y agoHi, I'm the developer. And I'm also a fan of IDA-like environment. REDasm is a project that tries to mimic IDAs interface and shortcuts but with a nicer, modern API. About the quality of x86-64 binaries: it should be pretty good (but far from perfect). Obviously with more binaries and test cases the quality of the generated listing can be improved!
- eggy 8y agoI like the interface. When I saw "RED" I thought it was developed in Red's system language. The release of Ghidra by the NSA has stole some of my attention. Given your expertise, what are your thoughts on Ghidra aside from the source? Thanks!
- Dax89 8y agoWell, 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. And...Java...
- tacotime 8y agoDoes 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.
- pjc50 8y agoRadare is also pretty difficult to learn on.
- videoForensics 8y agoSo I use capstone regularly. This sounds like a ui layer on top?
- Dax89 8y agoCapstone is just a backend above LibREDasm: you can create a new architecture from scratch.
- jchw 8y agoNice! 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.
- gizmo 8y agoYou 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.
- jchw 8y agoIt'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.
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y agoYeah, some of us got into this as a hobby because it can be done for so little.
- souprock 8y agoMaybe 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 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.
- johnisgood 8y agoI 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.
- Dax89 8y agoOpen an issue on GitHub: https://github.com/REDasmOrg/REDasm/issues https://github.com/REDasmOrg/REDasm/issues
- johnisgood 8y agoHold on, I see that it needs D3/Dagre/Dagre-D3. I am installing a few packages from AUR. It may work in a bit!
- Dax89 8y agoEverything is bundled in the executable! When you see that message, for some reason REDasm cannot generate a path for the current function and it should be fixed.
- johnisgood 8y agoAh. I do not have a GitHub account right now so I cannot create an issue. :(
- dgellow 8y agoThat looks great! Any plan to run on macOS?
- Dax89 8y agoI don't own a Mac, so I can't test the generated binaries. Someone reported me on Twitter that it compiles fine on a 64-bit OS with Clang. It doesn't compile with Clang on a 32-bit OS (there is a bug report for that).
- dgellow 8y agoOk, I will give it a try :)
- dgellow 8y agoSo, 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.
- Dax89 8y agoIt looks like this: https://github.com/REDasmOrg/REDasm/issues/14 https://github.com/REDasmOrg/REDasm/issues/14 But the OP doesn't answer so I can't fix it
- _wmd 8y agoThis looks very nice! But posting it a day ahead of NSA's Ghidra unveiling? It's going to be buried in the noise :(
- Dax89 8y agoI 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.
- vkaku 8y agoSweet! Good to have an IDA alternative! I hope the pricing remains sane once you guys make it big :)
- merlincorey 8y agoIf one is on Debian, here is a partial list of QT packages one might want to install to try this out: qt5-default libqt5webengine5 libqt5webenginewidgets5 Also it needs at least QT5.9, but Debian Stretch only has QT5.7.
- RDeckard 8y agoAny keyboard shortcuts? Can't seem to find any docs on it