Ghidra (pronounced GEE-druh; ) is a free and open source reverse engineering tool developed by the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States. The binaries were released at RSA Conference in March 2019; the sources were published one month later on GitHub. Ghidra is seen by many security researchers as a competitor to IDA Pro. The software is written in Java using the Swing framework for the GUI. The decompiler component is written in C++, and is therefore usable in a stand-alone form. Scripts to perform automated analysis with Ghidra can be written in Java or Python (via Jython), though this feature is extensible and support for other programming languages is available via community plugins. Plugins adding new features to Ghidra itself can be developed using a Java-based extension framework.

History

Ghidra's existence was originally revealed to the public via Vault 7 in March 2017, but the software itself remained unavailable until its declassification and official release two years later. Some comments in its source code indicates that it existed as early as 1999. In June 2019, coreboot began to use Ghidra for its reverse engineering efforts on firmware-specific problems following the open source release of the Ghidra software suite. Ghidra can be used, officially, as a debugger since Ghidra 10.0. Ghidra's debugger supports debugging user-mode Windows programs via WinDbg, and Linux programs via GDB.

Supported architectures

The following architectures or binary formats are supported: