IDA Splode

A tool that I wrote to help reversing on Windows. Also proof that I am bad at coming up with catchy names.

Presentation

See the presentation in slides/ for some examples on the sample application. I've also included an .idb that shows some of the features. All comments are auto-generated by the tool. The only input I provided was to give the structures a name, and to select various interesting instructions.

Requirements

• %PIN_HOME% points to an installation of Intel's Pin.
• MongoDB
• IDA Pro
• VS 2010

Usage

• Run build.bat from a MSVC 2010 console
• Optionally, enable page heap for test.exe (gflags /i test.exe +hpa)
• Run release.bat to trace the test.exe program in release mode
• Start MongoDB
• Run demo.exe.py to import the traces
• Start IDA Pro, open demo.exe
• Run py\idapython_script.py from within IDA
• If everything worked, ida-splode should automatically recognize all traces for the open binary from the database, and present a list of options.
• Press any of the hotkeys presented to do ${things}.
  • The slides should give you a good idea what is avaiable.
  • Ctrl+Shift+H reprints the help message

Tips

• If PageHeap isn't enabled (+hpa), it will waste a lot of time looking for heap metadata at instrumentation-time.
• For whatever reason, if _NT_SYMBOL_PATH includes any SYM* paths versus just local paths, it won't find PDBs and you'll only get exports. Use _NT_SYMBOL_PATH=C:\symbols or similar.
• There are lots of twiddly bits to turn on and off. See knobs.cpp.
• This is generally intended to be run off-line. Pin alone will make execution slow; my instrumentation has not been profiled or optimized for speed.
  • If you're not using a module white-list, only the main executable will be instrumented. Syntax for the whitelist is -m foo.exe -m bar.dll and is case-insensitive.
  • To speed things up, consider using the -r option to limit instrumentation to inside the scope of a particular routine (so you can skip all the start-up stuff). For example, -r demo!TestCustomMalloc.

Caveats

This is pulled from a working copy, so some things may not work properly. If you run into any issues, feel free to contact me at @ebeip90 or ebeip90 on Freenode.net.