this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2024

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No Stupid Questions

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NSA and Ghidra (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

9 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Do people trust Ghidra? How come it's been developed by the NSA? From an outsider perspective, that sounds so weird!

Thanks in advance to anyone able to enlighten me!

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

What is there not to trust? There are lots of disassemblers for binary files. Ghidra just comes with tools to make analyzing the resulting assembly code easier by doing things like graphing the jumps in code, allowing the user to give custom names to variables and functions, and attempting to convert the assembly into C code.

It would make sense that the NSA spends a lot of time reverse engineering programs. Not all hackers share their exploits publically, so one way to find unpublished exploits is by reverse engineering viruses and malware to find out what vulnerabilities are being exploited.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (3 children)

Yeah but.. isn't it weird that they share their tools then?

I'm not into conspiracy stuff. It's just that when I downloaded Ghidra for the first time, when I saw it was being published by the NSA, I had a "wow, didn't expect that" reaction and it somehow became a shower thought.

It may be important to say that I'm not from the US. Where I live, I'm not sure things like that would happen or have happened. Well, or it did and I didn't really pay attention.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

There is always some level of distrust of secretive organizations like the NSA/FBI/CIA/
Usually it's the previous gen / obsolete tech filters out of them, because they do want people to protect themselves a bit. I'd almost guarantee they have better / more advanced tools they aren't sharing.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

Indeed, that makes sense

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago

The NSA has two semis conflicting jobs. They are meant to gain access to foreign adversaries, as well as protecting american interests. Publishing ghidra goes towards the later.

There is also a law in the US that stuff developed by government agencies needs to be open sourced. I can't find the law, but there have been other bits of OSS stuff released by other agencies.

Selinux was developed by the NSA.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

They might enjoy the benefits of collaboration. Still the fact they are intimidating you with a public tool is also of benefit to their image as a powerful group. A large part of police work is intimidation.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

Ah, yes, that's also true. Thanks!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago

I think the NSA would be rather foolish to distribute their malware to the exact target audience that'd be the first to figure out they're infected.

The NSA serves to protect the USA, and giving security researchers the tools necessary to identify and reverse engineer malware fits perfectly within that goal. You can try to region lock that stuff, but the NSA isn't stupid enough to think that'll help.

If they want to hack you, they have much less obvious ways to get in. This is the organisation that adds PCBs to shipped computers and reflashes motherboard chips to hack targets.

Their real targets wouldn't be running NSA software anyway, not without a deep dive into the closed off parts of the program.

Also, there's no real alternative. There's radare2 and IDA, and that's about it really. Radare is an open source project that the could just as easily insert malware into, and IDA costs a ridiculous amount of money.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago

The problem is the alternative costs thousands of dollars and is out of the reach of some people.