NSA to release its GHIDRA reverse engineering tool for free

The existence of the framework, dubbed GHIDRA, was first
publicly revealed by WikiLeaks in CIA
Vault 7 leaks, but the tool once again came to light after Senior
NSA Adviser Robert Joyce announced to
publicly release the tool for free in his RSA Conference session
description.
^[1][2]

Reverse engineering tool is a disassembler, for example, IDA-Pro,
that help researchers identify certain portions of a program to see
how they work by reading information like its processor
instructions, instruction lengths, and more.

GHIDRA is a Java-based reverse engineering framework that
features a graphical user interface (GUI) and has been designed to
run on a variety of platforms including Windows, macOS, and Linux
operating systems, and also supports a variety of processor
instruction sets.

The toolkit can also be used to analyze binary files used by
programs, including malware, for all major operating systems,
including Windows, macOS, Linux as well as mobile platforms such as
Android and iOS.

A synopsis for Joyce’s presentation notes that “the Ghidra platform
includes all the features expected in high-end commercial tools,
with new and expanded functionality NSA uniquely developed, and
will be released for free public use at RSA.”

According to the Vault 7 documents, GHIDRA was initially
developed by the NSA in the early 2000s, and a Reddit user named
hash_define who claimed^[3] to have had access to
GHIDRA said that the tool had been shared with several other US
government agencies in past few years.

While there is no such announcement that the NSA is planning to
open source GHIDRA, some believe the agency will also publish
GHIDRA source code on NSA’s code repository hosted by Github where
it has already released 32 projects, so that the open source
community can help maintain it for free.