Book Image

Ghidra Software Reverse Engineering for Beginners

By : A. P. David
Book Image

Ghidra Software Reverse Engineering for Beginners

By: A. P. David

Overview of this book

Ghidra, an open source software reverse engineering (SRE) framework created by the NSA research directorate, enables users to analyze compiled code on any platform, whether Linux, Windows, or macOS. This book is a starting point for developers interested in leveraging Ghidra to create patches and extend tool capabilities to meet their cybersecurity needs. You'll begin by installing Ghidra and exploring its features, and gradually learn how to automate reverse engineering tasks using Ghidra plug-ins. You’ll then see how to set up an environment to perform malware analysis using Ghidra and how to use it in the headless mode. As you progress, you’ll use Ghidra scripting to automate the task of identifying vulnerabilities in executable binaries. The book also covers advanced topics such as developing Ghidra plug-ins, developing your own GUI, incorporating new process architectures if needed, and contributing to the Ghidra project. By the end of this Ghidra book, you’ll have developed the skills you need to harness the power of Ghidra for analyzing and avoiding potential vulnerabilities in code and networks.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Section 1: Introduction to Ghidra
6
Section 2: Reverse Engineering
12
Section 3: Extending Ghidra

Chapter 7: Using Ghidra Headless Analyzer

In this chapter, you will learn about the non-GUI capabilities of Ghidra, which are very useful when analyzing multiple binaries, automating tasks, or integrating Ghidra with other tools.

You've probably seen some films with hackers using black terminals with green font. There is some truth behind this stereotype. GUI applications are beautiful, user-friendly, and intuitive but they are also slow. After analyzing Ghidra headless mode, you will learn why shell applications and command line-based tools are the most efficient solution in a lot of cases.

Headless Analyzer is a powerful command line-based (non-GUI) version of Ghidra, which will be introduced in this chapter.

In this chapter, we're going to learn why a command line-based tool is very useful in a lot of cases. We will learn how to use headless mode to populate projects and how to perform an analysis of existing binaries. We will also learn how to run non-GUI scripts...