Pierluigi Paganini January 07, 2019

The National Security Agency (NSA) will release at the next RSA Conference a free reverse engineering framework called GHIDRA.

GHIDRA is a multi-platform reverse engineering framework that runs on major OSs (Windows, macOS, and Linux).

The framework was first mentioned in the CIA Vault 7 dump that was leaked in 2017. WikiLeaks obtained thousands of files allegedly originating from a CIA high-security network that details CIA hacking techniques, tools, and capabilities. Digging in the huge trove of files, it is possible to find also information about the GHIDRA, a Java-based engineering tool.

According to the announcement for the RSA Conference panels, the US intelligence Agency will present its tool.

“NSA has developed a software reverse engineering framework known as GHIDRA, which will be demonstrated for the first time at RSAC 2019,” stated the announcement published in the website of the RSA Conference.

“An interactive GUI capability enables reverse engineers to leverage an integrated set of features that run on a variety of platforms including Windows, Mac OS and LINUX and supports a variety of processor instruction sets. The GHIDRA platform includes all the features expected in high-end commercial tools, with new and expanded functionality NSA uniquely developed, and will be released for free public use at RSA.”

After the presentation at the RSA conference, the reverse engineering tool will be likely released as open source software.

Reddit users are already discussing tool in this Reddit thread.

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – GHIDRA, NSA)

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