6 ms·

Does anyone know what impact if any the release of Ghidra had on Hex-Rays? IDA never really accommodated to the hobbyist, so I wonder did it have any impact on

Does anyone know what impact if any the release of Ghidra had on Hex-Rays? IDA never really accommodated to the hobbyist, so I wonder did it have any impact on the commercial side of things apart from the IDA Home release?

fragmede 4y ago
They accommodated them by it not being too hard to crack using itself, which must have had a commercial impact.
mike_d 4y ago
Very little. Everyone who was passing around pirated copies of IDA continued to do so before and after the release of Ghidra. More than anything I think binary.ninja started to eat their lunch because it was a far superior experience and up front reasonable pricing. Hex-Rays did ultimately release IDA Home, but you have to sign up for an account to even find out what their hobbyist license costs. I cannot underscore how much Hex Rays never wanted to have customers or sell products. Maybe this restructuring will fix that?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- tptacek 4y ago
  They were, according to this, doing 20MM in 2020, which is surprisingly high for something like IDA. I think they mostly just don't want people like us as clients.
  - ylk 4y ago
    If you translate this article you’ll see that they didn’t just do 20 million in revenue, they made 18 million in profit with 18 employees, 11 of them being devs: https://archive.ph/Abxqp https://archive.ph/Abxqp
- bri3d 4y ago
  I disagree with this for a non-direct sales reason: before, you learned IDA, cracked or not. If you learned to reverse software of any kind, you acquired IDA. Now, more and more tutorials and introductions use Ghidra. Is it better than IDA? In some cases yes, in most not yet, but it’s easier to get. If I were Hex-Rays, I’d be very concerned with a generational shift as people stop bothering to pirate IDA and those who learned on Ghidra enter the industry and don’t demand an IDA license.
  - hunter-gatherer 4y ago
    This just came up in my current org a couple months ago and we cancelled our IDA licenses to start using Ghidra. Ghidra is ver capable in my opinion. When I was in the US Gov there were plenty of IDA licenses floating around despitr the existence of Ghidra. The Gov thinking was basically "better to have it and not need it instead of need it and not have it". There must be a thousand licenses that never get used year after year. I suspect IDA is safe for a while for this reason alone, but of course could be wrong and don't have the numbers-just speculation.
  - bpye 4y ago
    It's also really quite easy to add at least basic support to Ghidra for extra targets. I for example got quite far writing a TMS7000 [0] target for Ghidra [1] to reverse engineer the firmware for a TI teletype... though I still haven't dumped the ROMs to actually get further with it. [0] - http://www.bitsavers.org/components/ti/TMS7000/TMS7000_Family_Microarchitecture_-_Nov_1982.pdf http://www.bitsavers.org/components/ti/TMS7000/TMS7000_Famil... [1] - https://github.com/benpye/tms7000 https://github.com/benpye/tms7000
  - luch 4y ago
    Exactly, I am at a job where we have decades of cumulative experience using IDA and even we are wondering if we should not cut ourselves free of Hex-Rays's lock in and begrudgingly learn Ghidra. For a "new" professional/team, it makes zero sense to buy a IDA license nowadays.
- duskwuff 4y ago
  > Hex-Rays did ultimately release IDA Home, but you have to sign up for an account to even find out what their hobbyist license costs. And even then, IDA Home comes with some pretty serious limitations. It's not just a no-commercial-use version of IDA Pro; it's also a cut-down version with no decompiler, no batch mode, and which only disassembles code for one processor family (which you have to choose at the time of purchase, from a limited subset of what IDA Pro supports).
  - zahllos 4y ago
    IDA Pro doesn't come with a decompiler either. For that you need to spend extra and pay for the hex-rays license on top of the price for the disassembler. The total price kicks licensing costs well outside that of hobbyist use cases.
  - ylk 4y ago
    For IDA Home they do give you their cloud decompiler for 64-bit binaries: “The 64-bit PC, ARM and PPC come with a compatible cloud-based Decompiler currently in beta testing mode” https://hex-rays.com/products/idahome/ https://hex-rays.com/products/idahome/ But, like you said, IDA Home is additionally limited to one architecture, which is a bit annoying.
- Briggs958 4y ago
  [dead]
- ylk 4y ago
  > Hex-Rays did ultimately release IDA Home, but you have to sign up for an account to even find out what their hobbyist license costs. It was all over their release announcement and Twitter, iirc. From their website: “For the price of $365 / year” https://hex-rays.com/products/idahome/ https://hex-rays.com/products/idahome/
yakkityyak 4y ago
I ended up buying Binary Ninja for hobbyist projects instead. Worked great for doing a bit of Gameboy Advance rom hacking. IDA Pro for ARM w/ a decompiler is the cost of a used car.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- tptacek 4y ago
  It's roughly the cost of a very good Macbook, right? Many companies that employ the kinds of people who spend their days in IDA don't bat an eye at the cost of the laptops.
  - pseudo0 4y ago
    Around $3k for a one year floating license, then $4k per architecture, at least according to this price list: https://www.componentsource.com/product/ida-pro-hex-rays-decompilers/prices https://www.componentsource.com/product/ida-pro-hex-rays-dec...
    - tptacek 4y ago
      That's for floating licenses, though, which are like 2x the price of the fixed and named licenses, right? IDA has a problem where, for some shops, it really makes sense to just have one concurrent IDA user, because IDA is like 10-15% of the work hours --- but it's a critically important 10-15%. So they're super careful to charge for the ability to rotate a team of consultants through the same IDA license. We had a client, a decade or so ago, that brought us in to do IDA-based vulnerability research work. We wrote some blog posts about the work, and it was so unusual for any of their clients to have that licensing arrangement that IDA (this is in the Pierre era, not the Hex-Rays era) publicly accused us of pirating our copy (which was annoying, because we couldn't out our client, but they absolutely did have the licensing worked out for this.) It's all super off-putting. But IDA is in sort of a bind, because there just aren't that many users for their ultra-hyper-specialized product. You can have the very best decompiler in the world and you're still going to be a rounding error compared to companies like Figma, because (1) not that many people use disassemblers and (2) less and less software is written in C/C++ every year.
super256 4y ago
> Does anyone know what impact if any the release of Ghidra had on Hex-Rays? They added an undo button to IDA.
- colejohnson66 4y ago
  I get that undo support is hard, but twenty years?
Beached 4y ago
in my world of embedded reverse engineering, very few people use ghidra for their daily work. we use ida or binja or vivisect. we all know how to use it more or less at a hobbiest level, we even teach it at cons and trainings because it's free and people have heard of it. but for reeeeaaal work, that needs to be done by the deadline, it rarely gets considered.

fragmede 4y ago

They accommodated them by it not being too hard to crack using itself, which must have had a commercial impact.

mike_d 4y ago

Very little. Everyone who was passing around pirated copies of IDA continued to do so before and after the release of Ghidra. More than anything I think binary.ninja started to eat their lunch because it was a far superior experience and up front reasonable pricing. Hex-Rays did ultimately release IDA Home, but you have to sign up for an account to even find out what their hobbyist license costs. I cannot underscore how much Hex Rays never wanted to have customers or sell products. Maybe this restructuring will fix that?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tptacek 4y ago
They were, according to this, doing 20MM in 2020, which is surprisingly high for something like IDA. I think they mostly just don't want people like us as clients.
- ylk 4y ago
  If you translate this article you’ll see that they didn’t just do 20 million in revenue, they made 18 million in profit with 18 employees, 11 of them being devs: https://archive.ph/Abxqp https://archive.ph/Abxqp
bri3d 4y ago
I disagree with this for a non-direct sales reason: before, you learned IDA, cracked or not. If you learned to reverse software of any kind, you acquired IDA. Now, more and more tutorials and introductions use Ghidra. Is it better than IDA? In some cases yes, in most not yet, but it’s easier to get. If I were Hex-Rays, I’d be very concerned with a generational shift as people stop bothering to pirate IDA and those who learned on Ghidra enter the industry and don’t demand an IDA license.
- hunter-gatherer 4y ago
  This just came up in my current org a couple months ago and we cancelled our IDA licenses to start using Ghidra. Ghidra is ver capable in my opinion. When I was in the US Gov there were plenty of IDA licenses floating around despitr the existence of Ghidra. The Gov thinking was basically "better to have it and not need it instead of need it and not have it". There must be a thousand licenses that never get used year after year. I suspect IDA is safe for a while for this reason alone, but of course could be wrong and don't have the numbers-just speculation.
- bpye 4y ago
  It's also really quite easy to add at least basic support to Ghidra for extra targets. I for example got quite far writing a TMS7000 [0] target for Ghidra [1] to reverse engineer the firmware for a TI teletype... though I still haven't dumped the ROMs to actually get further with it. [0] - http://www.bitsavers.org/components/ti/TMS7000/TMS7000_Family_Microarchitecture_-_Nov_1982.pdf http://www.bitsavers.org/components/ti/TMS7000/TMS7000_Famil... [1] - https://github.com/benpye/tms7000 https://github.com/benpye/tms7000
- luch 4y ago
  Exactly, I am at a job where we have decades of cumulative experience using IDA and even we are wondering if we should not cut ourselves free of Hex-Rays's lock in and begrudgingly learn Ghidra. For a "new" professional/team, it makes zero sense to buy a IDA license nowadays.
duskwuff 4y ago
> Hex-Rays did ultimately release IDA Home, but you have to sign up for an account to even find out what their hobbyist license costs. And even then, IDA Home comes with some pretty serious limitations. It's not just a no-commercial-use version of IDA Pro; it's also a cut-down version with no decompiler, no batch mode, and which only disassembles code for one processor family (which you have to choose at the time of purchase, from a limited subset of what IDA Pro supports).
- zahllos 4y ago
  IDA Pro doesn't come with a decompiler either. For that you need to spend extra and pay for the hex-rays license on top of the price for the disassembler. The total price kicks licensing costs well outside that of hobbyist use cases.
- ylk 4y ago
  For IDA Home they do give you their cloud decompiler for 64-bit binaries: “The 64-bit PC, ARM and PPC come with a compatible cloud-based Decompiler currently in beta testing mode” https://hex-rays.com/products/idahome/ https://hex-rays.com/products/idahome/ But, like you said, IDA Home is additionally limited to one architecture, which is a bit annoying.
Briggs958 4y ago
[dead]
ylk 4y ago
> Hex-Rays did ultimately release IDA Home, but you have to sign up for an account to even find out what their hobbyist license costs. It was all over their release announcement and Twitter, iirc. From their website: “For the price of $365 / year” https://hex-rays.com/products/idahome/ https://hex-rays.com/products/idahome/

yakkityyak 4y ago

I ended up buying Binary Ninja for hobbyist projects instead. Worked great for doing a bit of Gameboy Advance rom hacking. IDA Pro for ARM w/ a decompiler is the cost of a used car.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tptacek 4y ago
It's roughly the cost of a very good Macbook, right? Many companies that employ the kinds of people who spend their days in IDA don't bat an eye at the cost of the laptops.
- pseudo0 4y ago
  Around $3k for a one year floating license, then $4k per architecture, at least according to this price list: https://www.componentsource.com/product/ida-pro-hex-rays-decompilers/prices https://www.componentsource.com/product/ida-pro-hex-rays-dec...
  - tptacek 4y ago
    That's for floating licenses, though, which are like 2x the price of the fixed and named licenses, right? IDA has a problem where, for some shops, it really makes sense to just have one concurrent IDA user, because IDA is like 10-15% of the work hours --- but it's a critically important 10-15%. So they're super careful to charge for the ability to rotate a team of consultants through the same IDA license. We had a client, a decade or so ago, that brought us in to do IDA-based vulnerability research work. We wrote some blog posts about the work, and it was so unusual for any of their clients to have that licensing arrangement that IDA (this is in the Pierre era, not the Hex-Rays era) publicly accused us of pirating our copy (which was annoying, because we couldn't out our client, but they absolutely did have the licensing worked out for this.) It's all super off-putting. But IDA is in sort of a bind, because there just aren't that many users for their ultra-hyper-specialized product. You can have the very best decompiler in the world and you're still going to be a rounding error compared to companies like Figma, because (1) not that many people use disassemblers and (2) less and less software is written in C/C++ every year.

super256 4y ago

> Does anyone know what impact if any the release of Ghidra had on Hex-Rays? They added an undo button to IDA.

colejohnson66 4y ago
I get that undo support is hard, but twenty years?

Beached 4y ago

in my world of embedded reverse engineering, very few people use ghidra for their daily work. we use ida or binja or vivisect. we all know how to use it more or less at a hobbiest level, we even teach it at cons and trainings because it's free and people have heard of it. but for reeeeaaal work, that needs to be done by the deadline, it rarely gets considered.