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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 t

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.
    - pseudo0 4y ago
      It's not that much cheaper. $1,935.50 for a one year fixed or named license, then $2,709.70 per architecture. Let's say you need the typical four for x86 and ARM, that's over $12k per seat. A lot of companies would balk at that.
      - tptacek 4y ago
        I've long since lost track of the pricing here, but the per-arch stuff is for the decompiler, right?
        pseudo0 4y ago
        Yeah, that's for the decompiler. And I just saw your edit and agree that they are in a tricky spot. Their product is hyper-specialized and they deserve to get paid for the craft and expertise that they have put into their product, but at the same time they have been a significant barrier to entry for people getting into SRE due to the prohibitive cost. Their new offering of a limited license for $365 a year is a step in the right direction, but they only took that step after competition forced their hand. Edit: Ironically the NSA is the entity commoditizing their complement here, getting an in-house SRE tool and making it easier to hire students out of college with skills they want.
        tptacek 4y ago
        Sure! Don't get me wrong: they an extremely off-putting company. I just think I get where they're coming from.
        ev1 4y ago
        Can you even get the limited licence? It feels like they are comically hostile, ask for a huge amount of really unnecessary things, "KYC procedures", for a $1/day commodity software
    - q-big 4y ago
      > 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 (1) could be changed by making a decent offer to hobbyists that they can't refuse, and making the buying experience for them hassle-free.
- saagarjha 4y ago
  Right, but if you want that MacBook you call up Apple and they will ship you those computers tomorrow, hassle-free, and you can hand those laptops to any of your employees without someone harassing you for how you're doing licensing. For large companies the issue isn't even the cost but the annoyance. Like, the employees who use those IDA licenses are paid pretty well…annoyances you put in the path of them getting IDA that waste their time are pretty expensive too.
  - rfoo 4y ago
    It's hilarious that pirating a (DRM-less!) software is much easier than purchasing it. Even if you had the money and really want to buy it.
    - sirsinsalot 4y ago
      The pirates probably used a pirated IDA to pirate it
      - gruez 4y ago
        There’s basically no DRM on IDA/hex-rays though.
- zahllos 4y ago
  Depends a bit what you do. I work with firmware that uses all kinds of architectures. Paying an extra $2k per architecture I want the decompiler for is simply too much. Yes, the license cost is likely marginal if you only disassemble Windows malware on Windows.
gnfargbl 4y ago
Hopper is worth a look, also: https://www.hopperapp.com/ https://www.hopperapp.com/. Very reasonably priced.
- tsujamin 4y ago
  Hopper is my go-to for light reveng or macOS binaries, Ghidra for Windows mainly because you can refine your typing until the decompiler window becomes very readable. as an aside - When I was taught Ghidra the trainer said "in IDA you spend most of your time in the disassembly graph, in Ghidra I rarely leave the decompiler"
  - arsome 4y ago
    Interesting, I found Ghidras decompiler much less capable than IDA's. It generated incorrect or partial output far too often and the code generated was always extremely verbose, much less concise than IDA's, though this was shortly after the public release of Ghidra, things may have changed since.
nebula8804 4y ago
Have you seen the price of used cars due to inflation? Those prices ain't going down for years given the 2+ years long supply shortage of new cars. If anything software like IDA is one of the few things to avoid inflation (at least partially) so it becomes better value as time goes on.

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.
  - pseudo0 4y ago
    It's not that much cheaper. $1,935.50 for a one year fixed or named license, then $2,709.70 per architecture. Let's say you need the typical four for x86 and ARM, that's over $12k per seat. A lot of companies would balk at that.
    - tptacek 4y ago
      I've long since lost track of the pricing here, but the per-arch stuff is for the decompiler, right?
      - pseudo0 4y ago
        Yeah, that's for the decompiler. And I just saw your edit and agree that they are in a tricky spot. Their product is hyper-specialized and they deserve to get paid for the craft and expertise that they have put into their product, but at the same time they have been a significant barrier to entry for people getting into SRE due to the prohibitive cost. Their new offering of a limited license for $365 a year is a step in the right direction, but they only took that step after competition forced their hand. Edit: Ironically the NSA is the entity commoditizing their complement here, getting an in-house SRE tool and making it easier to hire students out of college with skills they want.
        tptacek 4y ago
        Sure! Don't get me wrong: they an extremely off-putting company. I just think I get where they're coming from.
        ev1 4y ago
        Can you even get the limited licence? It feels like they are comically hostile, ask for a huge amount of really unnecessary things, "KYC procedures", for a $1/day commodity software
  - q-big 4y ago
    > 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 (1) could be changed by making a decent offer to hobbyists that they can't refuse, and making the buying experience for them hassle-free.
saagarjha 4y ago
Right, but if you want that MacBook you call up Apple and they will ship you those computers tomorrow, hassle-free, and you can hand those laptops to any of your employees without someone harassing you for how you're doing licensing. For large companies the issue isn't even the cost but the annoyance. Like, the employees who use those IDA licenses are paid pretty well…annoyances you put in the path of them getting IDA that waste their time are pretty expensive too.
- rfoo 4y ago
  It's hilarious that pirating a (DRM-less!) software is much easier than purchasing it. Even if you had the money and really want to buy it.
  - sirsinsalot 4y ago
    The pirates probably used a pirated IDA to pirate it
    - gruez 4y ago
      There’s basically no DRM on IDA/hex-rays though.
zahllos 4y ago
Depends a bit what you do. I work with firmware that uses all kinds of architectures. Paying an extra $2k per architecture I want the decompiler for is simply too much. Yes, the license cost is likely marginal if you only disassemble Windows malware on Windows.

gnfargbl 4y ago

Hopper is worth a look, also: https://www.hopperapp.com/ https://www.hopperapp.com/. Very reasonably priced.

tsujamin 4y ago
Hopper is my go-to for light reveng or macOS binaries, Ghidra for Windows mainly because you can refine your typing until the decompiler window becomes very readable. as an aside - When I was taught Ghidra the trainer said "in IDA you spend most of your time in the disassembly graph, in Ghidra I rarely leave the decompiler"
- arsome 4y ago
  Interesting, I found Ghidras decompiler much less capable than IDA's. It generated incorrect or partial output far too often and the code generated was always extremely verbose, much less concise than IDA's, though this was shortly after the public release of Ghidra, things may have changed since.

nebula8804 4y ago

Have you seen the price of used cars due to inflation? Those prices ain't going down for years given the 2+ years long supply shortage of new cars. If anything software like IDA is one of the few things to avoid inflation (at least partially) so it becomes better value as time goes on.