Hacker News Reader

Comment by eugenekolo2 | Hacker News Reader

Nice looking, but it's just IDA w/ Undo, and less features.

There has to be a shift in use case design more than making it prettier.

IDA is typically too expensive for hobbyist reverse engineers, not to mention has a pretty steep learning curve for it. If this helps introduce new people into reverse engineering I'm all for it.

Give them a break man, it's the first release...

Don't take it the wrong way. It looks like a nice start. I just wish for better reversing tooling, and am merely giving a critique that if this was to replace IDA for me, it'd have to provide something that IDA does not.

There's plenty of things IDA does that we don't do, but the list of things we do they don't is growing.

To start with, we have undo, which is a simple feature but it underlies some design decisions that are going to show up in other features in the near future as well.

Because we have the ability to separate user interactions from our internal analysis we can not only undo, but also better support collaborative editing and upgrading of older saved databases.

In terms of features we already have, we have a static data flow implementation that allows you to query register values at addresses which greatly simplifies a lot of analysis plugins. Here's an example:

http://arm.ninja/2016/03/08/intro-to-binary-ninja-api/

(The domain name is a coincidence, Q was just a beta tester, not officially affiliated with us)

Notice how much more robust and simpler the final implementation of that plugin using our data flow is:

https://github.com/Vector35/binaryninja-api/blob/dev/python/...

I see that you have faithfully replicated at least some of IDA's insane graph view glitches.

Do you have the one where a line goes to one side by more than a screen's width, goes down a tad, and then goes back sideways to nearly where it started?

To me it is just IDA at a price a hobbyist can afford, with a nicer UI as a bonus

Reply on news.ycombinator.com