5 ms·

I was quite suspicious of it when it was first announced, but an open source RE tool is probably the stupidest place to put a backdoor. Author considerations as

I was quite suspicious of it when it was first announced, but an open source RE tool is probably the stupidest place to put a backdoor. Author considerations aside, it’s a great tool, and does pretty well with decompiling.

thedracle 5y ago
I'm amazed at how often it does better than hexrays decompiler wise. It's pretty spectacular. Radare2 has a plugin for using ghidra's decompiler too https://github.com/radareorg/r2ghidra https://github.com/radareorg/r2ghidra So you can get all of the terminal level unix like goodness of radare2, yet still get really great ghidra quality decompiler output.
userbinator 5y ago
How well does it decompile itself? I've always considered that a great test, much like a self-compiling compiler is a notable milestone. (I believe IDA has a check to stop you from doing this. Cracking that was one of the "rite of passage" exercises back in the day.)
- rjzzleep 5y ago
  Isn't it written in Java? Why would it need to do that? IDA has had watermarks and all sorts of other fancy stuff. The real challenge with IDA was extending the demo to allow it to save databases before they started publishing a working older free version. I like IDA a lot more than I like all the other tools, especially since I consider the user experience and hotkeys far superior, but the other day I did look at something where the disassembly and decompilation was great compared to other tools(one of the r2+ghidra UIs). I think because flirt signatures were missing and I can't get Hexrays to sell me a new license.
  - NotSwift 5y ago
    Even better, the NSA provides the sources which you can compile yourself: https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra/releases https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra/releases
- lima 5y ago
  It's open source and written in Java.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    And if anyone is curious, Java byte code is very easy to decompile and it will come up quite close to the real thing (unless obfuscated)

thedracle 5y ago

I'm amazed at how often it does better than hexrays decompiler wise. It's pretty spectacular. Radare2 has a plugin for using ghidra's decompiler too https://github.com/radareorg/r2ghidra https://github.com/radareorg/r2ghidra So you can get all of the terminal level unix like goodness of radare2, yet still get really great ghidra quality decompiler output.

userbinator 5y ago

How well does it decompile itself? I've always considered that a great test, much like a self-compiling compiler is a notable milestone. (I believe IDA has a check to stop you from doing this. Cracking that was one of the "rite of passage" exercises back in the day.)

rjzzleep 5y ago
Isn't it written in Java? Why would it need to do that? IDA has had watermarks and all sorts of other fancy stuff. The real challenge with IDA was extending the demo to allow it to save databases before they started publishing a working older free version. I like IDA a lot more than I like all the other tools, especially since I consider the user experience and hotkeys far superior, but the other day I did look at something where the disassembly and decompilation was great compared to other tools(one of the r2+ghidra UIs). I think because flirt signatures were missing and I can't get Hexrays to sell me a new license.
- NotSwift 5y ago
  Even better, the NSA provides the sources which you can compile yourself: https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra/releases https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra/releases
lima 5y ago
It's open source and written in Java.
- kaba0 5y ago
  And if anyone is curious, Java byte code is very easy to decompile and it will come up quite close to the real thing (unless obfuscated)