The National Security Agency of the United States (NSA) released the open-source reverse engineering application named “Ghidra”.
Last Tuesday the senior security advisor of the NSA, Rob Joyce, presented the “Ghidra” at the RSA conference in San Francisco.
The application is a useful tool for decompiling and analyzing malicious software and is available for free to all users. “Ghidra” features include an “undo” function, the ability for multiple people to collaborate on the same project, the option to use templates and register extensions and plugins, as well as the fact that it is supported by different processors.
“Ghidra” was previously classified, although its existence was revealed in 2017 after a CIA leak by WikiLeaks . The cybersecurity community has been excited as there has been no reverse engineering application that fully meets its needs.
The IDA application, which so far has played a leading role in the market, costs between $879 and $3,944 while also requiring a lot of personal information to grant a software license, a fact that understandably displeases many users. Many, in fact, to avoid the high cost of the application, downloaded it illegally from the internet or even used another one, which although free, did not fully meet their needs, such as, for example, Radare, which has been created by volunteers.
The upcoming success of “Ghidra” is foreshadowed by the fact that it is open source and free, which makes it easy to use and accessible to many users. Although it is released by the NSA, which in the past faced backlash due to the leaks made by Edward Snowden, but also due to the fact that it lost important hacking tools that caused the largest cyber attack in the world, its reputation does not seem to be affected.
