[GTALUG] reverse engineering

[Kevin Cozens]

On 2019-03-09 6:06 p.m., D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
> Sometimes I get annoyed at binaries for which I don't have any code.
[snip]
> One way to pry these open is through reverse engineering tools
> 
> What prompts this message is that the NSA has just released Ghindra as
> open source.
[snip]
> There are some other choices:
> <https://reverseengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1817/is-there-any-disassembler-to-rival-ida-pro#1821>

I found myself working on a project where the source code was lost. The 
project uses a NanoPi that uses an Allwinner chip which is a 64-bit Aarch 
(ARM v8) architecture.

I've tried several decompilers but they didn't work, or wouldn't even 
compile. I looked at boomerang, Hopper, snowman, retdec, and reko. The ones 
that work wouldn't handle the architecture. The ghidra decompiler has been 
the only one that has proven useful. I haven't read enough about it to know 
how to save source code out of it but I can browse decompiled output which 
is at least the first step in reconstituting source code.

-- 
Cheers!

Kevin.

http://www.ve3syb.ca/               | "Nerds make the shiny things that
https://www.patreon.com/KevinCozens | distract the mouth-breathers, and
                                     | that's why we're powerful"
Owner of Elecraft K2 #2172          |
#include <disclaimer/favourite>     |             --Chris Hardwick