Automated Struct Identification with Ghidra
At GRIMM, we do a lot of vulnerability and binary analysis research. As such, we often seek to automate some of the analysis steps and ease the burden on the individual researcher. One task which can be very mundane and time consuming for certain types of programs (C++, firmware, etc), is identifying structures' fields and applying the structure types to the corresponding functions within the decompiler. Thus, this summer we gave one of our interns, Alex Lin , the task of developing a Ghidra plugin to automatically identify a binary's structs and mark up the decompilation accordingly. Alex's writeup below describes the results of the project, GEARSHIFT, which automates struct identification of function parameters by symbolically interpreting Ghidra's P-Code to determine how each parameter is accessed. The Ghidra plugin described in this blog can be found in our GEARSHIFT repository . Background Ghidra is a binary reverse engineering tool developed by the National Sec...