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Comment by status200 | Hacker News Reader

Ghidra is a lifesaver for legacy systems that have a bunch of home-spun executables that make bespoke things function and rotate out random technicians over the years, when they fail it is a pain to figure out what they explicitly do, so reverse engineering them is sometimes the only option when a new tool needs to be built that does the same thing but without the parts that are deprecated. I hadn't seen this class before so I look forward to filling in my knowledge gaps around this software, thank you.

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I patched a bug in a router firmware and jailbroke another router using Ghidra (mostly but also binwalk).

I have no business being able to do either, still both became weekend tasks using Ghidra.

I've since played around with hopper, binary ninja and radare2. Fun!

> I've since played around with hopper, binary ninja and radare2. Fun!

Would you recommend any of those. I’ve only ever played with the limited free IDA and Ghidra.

Only Radare2 which is FOSS and also can use the Ghidra decompiler.

It's also cool as hell to use if you use the command line UI (nurses?)

You might want to check Cutter[1][2] also. Our release builds come with decompiler included.

[1] https://cutter.re

[2] https://github.com/rizinorg/cutter

Sorry I missed you out! I have used cutter.

It may be a sore point but I have a niggling curiousity did cutter previously work with R2 and there was some beef?

See "Why did you fork radare2?" [1] from the Rizin FAQ.

For more details, see (well, listen to) the episode of the Unnamed Reverse Engineering podcast which covered Rizin/Cutter [2].

[1] https://rizin.re/posts/faq/

[2] https://unnamedre.com/episode/45

See also my answer in a different thread about technical differences between two: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36399085

there's a name I haven't seen in a minute, I'll have to check this out again

I'd recommend binary ninja if you're serious about reversing. Not that expensive for a personal license.

Ghidra is nice, but being FOSS it will always be slightly worse then paid. It's fantastic for free, but not perfect. If reversing is part time/once a month/once every few months then its probably the best choice. Used it for a few years professionally.

binja is my favorite and been using it for the last year or so. just an absolute pleasure to use and collaborate with. IMO the best of all these tools. vector35 are great to work with as well. plugin development is real nice too

IDA pro is the worst. hexrays are plain awful to work with and its so overpriced.

hopper haven't tried, but seems good. mac only though

r2 is interesting. great if you only have a headless connection, but difficult. Learning curve is tough, and payoff isn't necessarily there. an alternative to ghidra if you want free but want to feel more l33t

> Ghidra is nice, but being FOSS it will always be slightly worse then paid.

lol, you know this isn’t true :)

This is a strange take for me to see, maybe OP doesn't have the context that the US government has been funding Ghidra development for years now (before ultimately open sourcing it), and will no doubt continue to do so for years to come.

This is the software used by NSA and contractors to analyze malware. From a UI perspective I get that it's clunky, but from a capabilities perspective I doubt there is much lacking.

> I have no business being able to do either ...

Why not?

They probably mean Ghidra made it relatively easy despite them not having that much experience in it

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