5 March 2018

Plugin: 10k view on functions

I'm always writing code for all the wrong reasons. Last weekend I had an idea to do large scale testing of one of my plugins for Binary Ninja - Annotator. There is however a little use of testing your plugin on code you wrote and compiled yourself, so at some point you have to hit the proverbial road and start testing things in the wild. Before I even had some kind of structured plan I've opened some binaries on the system. I think I've picked up chmod. Now, I was interested in in some not terribly complicated functions that call some libc functions. I've opened one at random - 10 instructions and no calls. Next one - 30 basic blocks, 130 instructions (or something). I think I gave up with manual hit-and-miss after third one.

So, I've started writing another plugin to help me with development of my another plugin. I've decided to simply count instruction, basic blocks, functions calls and code xrefs (last one inspired by one person on binary ninja slack). After quickly putting together some code I've decided to put more structure around it so I can extend it later on with additional reports. I've named it Keyhole.

My biggest problem right now is that HTML widget offered by QT has very weak support for styles, therefore the report looks like, well, let's just say far from my ascetics expectations. I guess I will have to, instead of relying on built-in browser save it on disk and launch separate browser instance to pick it up from there. This time with proper styling.

And here question for my lovely audience - what other characteristics you are looking at before you even begin reversing a binary. Is there anything you might consider worth adding? My idea is to add some sort of entropy heat map (like here) and some other things. Well, that will have to wait of course, at least until I wrap up changes to Annotator.