Thank The NSA For Their Ghidra Software Now Helping Firmware Reverse Engineering

[DavidKL]

Reality check. Literally all and every nation on Earth, excepting the failed countries like Somalia maybe, are spying on each-other. ... Hypocrites

1) tu quoque fallacy – "Running over grandma is fine because those people run over grandma and pets!"

2) fatalism fallacy — "It must be always because it is right now."

3) ad hominem fallacy — Name-calling/shoot the messenger to avoid confronting the message.

Plus, as others noted, you ignored the issues of information sharing/jurisdiction, in terms of the nefariousness of exposure to repressive surveillance. A lot of that may be wishful thinking, though, since vacuuming-up data from the big pipes has been standard practice for quite some time now, as far as I know.

[Luke]

Indeed spying is something everyone does. Even at my level: I still remember the early 1990's women's clinic defense work, where each side put spies in the other side's meetings. Theirs we caught, ours they did not.

As for the NSA, we can all benefit from monitoring any deprecation of any cipher by them even if we cannot trust their recommendations on what to use. Anytime they USED to approve a cipher for communication with government agencies and withdraw that approval, that means they've cracked it, someone else they monitor has cracked it, or they see a way it can be cracked. If NSA deprecates a cipher, stop using it! They try to be the first to break any cipher, as do all crypto agencies globally. Their problem is what to do with one they crack: if they keep it secret, they can use the crack but what happens if the MSS, FSB, Persian intelligence etc finds it too? If they tell government agencies or contractors to stop using it they can stop things like CIA assets being caught and executed, at the price that Daesh et all stop using it too and the NSA can't use the crack to read their traffic.

BestHW backdoor defense is to use hardware made in a country that does not share intel with your own. If you are a Chinese student protesting in Hong Kong, do NOT use Chinese hardware, use Tiawan's stuff instead. NSA can get in if they want but isn't going to share any take with the MSS. If you are hard antifa protesting Trump and his torch-waving buddies, use mainland Chinese hardware as MSS isn't going to give him the time of day with that trade war going on. Once you have that hardware, don't load it with backdoored closed-source software written in your own country either.

[aht0]

but russia nor china havnt requested direct access via intel me ..psp....
well almost forgot this one. ...https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comme...x_three_times/
so if not beeing able to get access the kernel? why not getting access before kernel ist loaded?

sure russia or china would try the same if they would have amd and intel under their "jurisdictation"

Considering the sheer amount of electronics being produced in China, can you really be as stupid as to think they don't dabble in covert SIGINT surveillance..? Even through consumer goods. I remind you Chinese laws, where all private companies are required to cooperate with domestic intelligence agencies if so requested. Over half the electronics around us carries label "Made in China". And Chinese philosophy of intelligence gathering equals to collecting even most spurious tid-bits, on off chance it might become useful later.

Russian strong side is HUMINT, not SIGINT but even their military signal intelligence and electronic warfare-tech is ahead of West. Spying on cellular phones across borders, planting fake cellular base stations near NATO military installations, you name it, you have it. If they produced electronic consumer goods people across world would buy, you can bet your ass hefty chunk of it would be backdoored.

So, for one party backdooring is immoral, especially when it represents "free country" but when the agency belongs to oligarchy, dictatorship or feudal-industrial power, then, since their deeds are suppressed and not publicly talked about, they are quite okay? Or what? Because I don't see Russian or Chinese spyagencies bashed in a similar manner. At all.

[CochainComplex]

Reality check. Literally all and every nation on Earth, excepting the failed countries like Somalia maybe, are spying on each-other. Degree of activity may differ but I am somehow sure that Chinese or Russian spying efforts are no less than NSA's - somehow for Phoronix moronics NSA is a "popular" bashing subject. But "out of view, out of mind", despite the liberties violated and identical global reach - other and even more repressive agencies in the world do not seem to bother any forum user here. Hypocrites.

but russia nor china havnt requested direct access via intel me ..psp....

well almost forgot this one. ...https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comme...x_three_times/
so if not beeing able to get access the kernel? why not getting access before kernel ist loaded?

sure russia or china would try the same if they would have amd and intel under their "jurisdictation" but at the moment only nsa is in this position ..so yes there are valid reasons to complain here.

[Jabberwocky]

EDIT: IDA Pro + a decompiler for one architecture is £1,136.93 + £3,039.55 (yikes!) No wonder people are pirating it.

If you use IDA to it's full potential you're better off not using the pirated versions. Currently there are no pirated versions > 7.2 on the public internet. It's not easy to get cracked 7.2 to work platforms other than x86_64. In my opinion the price is not unreasonable if you considering the work that has gone into it, that said it won't cost them that much to improve Linux support. There are ways of obtaining legal copies for much less or in some rare cases free. They offer bounty programs to those who have time and talent: https://www.hex-rays.com/bugbounty.shtml

A freeware version of IDA v7.0 for Linux, Windows, and Mac exists. It has the following limitations: no commercial use is allowed, lacks all features introduced in IDA > v7.0, lacks support for many processors. file formats. etc..., comes without technical support.

From what experts say Ghidra sounds good especially if you're not using Windows. I don't plan on trying it anytime soon though.

[aht0]

[*]NSA is still spying on people, not just within USA, but also internationally. Adding one and subtracting a thousand is still a huge negative.

Reality check. Literally all and every nation on Earth, excepting the failed countries like Somalia maybe, are spying on each-other. Degree of activity may differ but I am somehow sure that Chinese or Russian spying efforts are no less than NSA's - somehow for Phoronix moronics NSA is a "popular" bashing subject. But "out of view, out of mind", despite the liberties violated and identical global reach - other and even more repressive agencies in the world do not seem to bother any forum user here. Hypocrites.

[q2dg]

Ghidra being open sourced is good. However, before softening up for NSA remember that:

• NSA gets free labor out of open sourcing Ghidra. Besides, there is no good reason for them to keep it closed source anyway. So it is a benefit for them too.
• NSA is still spying on people, not just within USA, but also internationally. Adding one and subtracting a thousand is still a huge negative.

With all that aside, it'll be very exciting to see what reverse engineers can accomplish with this tool. We should also be glad that IDA Pro is getting some competition.

EDIT: IDA Pro + a decompiler for one architecture is £1,136.93 + £3,039.55 (yikes!) No wonder people are pirating it.

Radare2 is KING! (https://rada.re)

[kpedersen]

We should also be glad that IDA Pro is getting some competition..

Agreed. But there is also OllyDbg (for win32) and radare2 and they never quite managed to shake it off top spot .

My claim to fame is that I made the original port of radare2 to FreeBSD (I did barely anything, it was already very portable, I just pretty much made the Makefile and dependency list XD).

Where IDA will still do well is with the plugins (such as stealth to hide against some anti-cracking measures) and scripts to help facilitate automatically unpacking from things like Thinstall, molebox etc.

[tildearrow]

I absolutely refuse

Me too. They may have developed a useful tool, but its invasiveness on our lifes makes me not want to thank them.

[davidbepo]

Thank The NSA

I absolutely refuse