IDA-minsc

General

IDA-minsc is a plugin for IDA Pro that assists a user with scripting the IDAPython plugin that is bundled with the disassembler. This plugin groups the different aspects of the IDAPython API into a simpler format which allows a reverse engineer to script different aspects of their work with very little investment.

A number of concepts are introduced such as a tagging system, support for multicased functions, and filtering with the intention that most search and annotation issues can be performed with just a few lines of code. This should enable a user to write quick, hacky, temporary code that can be used to augment their reversing endeavors without distraction.

Installation

Installation should be pretty simple and requires simply cloning the repository directly into the user's IDA user directory. On the Windows platform, this is typically located at %APPDATA%/Hex-Rays/IDA Pro. Whereas on the Linux platform this can be found at $HOME/.idapro. This contents of this repository should actually replace that directory. If you have any files that presently reside there, simply move them into the repository's directory. After installation, IDA Pro should load its IDAPython plugin which should result in the idapythonrc.py belonging to IDA-minsc being executed which will then replace IDAPython's default namespace with the one belonging to the plugin's.

To clone the repository in a directory $TARGET, one can simply do:

$ git clone https://github.com/arizvisa/ida-minsc "$TARGET"

After cloning the repository, the user will need to install its required Python dependencies into their site-packages. This can be done using pip which is a tool that is bundled with Python. The file that contains the user's requirements is in the root of the repository as requirements.txt.

To install the required Python dependencies, one can run pip as so:

$ pip install -r "requirements.txt"

At this point when the user starts IDA Pro, IDA-minsc will replace IDAPython's namespace with its own at which point can be used immediately. To verify that IDA-minsc was installed properly, one can simply type in the following at the IDAPython prompt:

> database.config.version()

This should then return the number 0 since no database has been loaded.

Quick Start

After installing the python dependencies, you can do something like the following to list all the functions in your database:

> database.functions.list()

Or to iterate through all the functions in the database, you can try:

> for ea in database.functions():
      print(hex(ea))

Please refer to the documentation for more details on what this plugin makes available to you.

Documentation

Comprehensive documentation is available at the project page on github.io, or can be built locally via the "docs" branch.

If the user wishes to build documentation for local use, they will first need to install the Sphinx package. Afterwards, the entirety of the documentation resides within in the "docs" branch. Simply checkout the branch, change the directory to "docs", and then run GNU make as:

$ make html

This will result in the build system parsing the available modules and then rendering all of the documentation into the _build directory relative to the docs/Makefile. Documentation can be generated for a number of different formats. To list all of the available formats, type in make help at the command prompt.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for best practices on reporting issues or for adding functionality to this project.

Thanks

Thanks to a number of anonymous and non-anonymous people whom have helped with the development of this plugin over all of these years.