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by unwind 4897 days ago
Fantastic feature to show branches graphically in the margin as arrows.

Blindingly obvious, but still saves a lot of mental effort in keeping addresses in your head.

Haven't seen any "desktop disassembler" (that sounds furniture-related) do that.
2 comments
borski 4897 days ago
IDA Pro shows branches/jumps as a graph, which I think is even better: http://www.hex-rays.com/products/ida/pix/5_plain_graph_view....

When not in graph mode, it'll show jump arrows in the margin: http://www.chip.de/ii/146940129_e98df3e41d.jpg

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wladimir 4897 days ago
IDA Pro is crazily expensive though, and probably not worth it unless you're doing reverse engineering / exploit finding for a living. For example it's a bit overkill for just looking at disassembly to see what code the compiler has written, which (I think) is the common use case of objdump.
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anigbrowl 4897 days ago
That's true, and it seems to bog down easily in my (limited) experience with it. Ollydbg is fast and free, and very navigable. http://www.ollydbg.de/ Oh, it too has arrows. That's what I mean by navigable. 32 bit only though.
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tptacek 4896 days ago
Ollydbg has more or less given way to Immunity Debugger, which is what you should be checking out if that's the flavor of reversing tool you're after.

I don't know a lot of people who use IDA as a debugger and like it.

On the other hand, IDA's a better disassembler (and not just because it handles multiple architectures) than Olly. It's the industry standard for a good reason.

Hopper.app is giving it a run for its money on x86 and ARM. Hopper is all I use now.

I think it's ironic that people think IDA is too expensive; it's not expensive enough, given its total addressable market. IDA's prices are so low that they artificially depress the market for all reverse engineering tools, which anchor or orbit around IDA's price point. Hex-Rays is trying to break out of that with the decompiler, but then Hopper did a good-enough decompiler and bundled it into a $100 tool.

Professionals that use IDA (a) rely on it heavily (b) can use the same version of IDA for years and years (c) routinely bill out over 250-300/hr and (d) number in the tens of thousands. It's an interesting business case study.

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anigbrowl 4896 days ago
Most interesting! I just do reversing for fun rather than profit, but Immunity and Hopper both look very impressive.
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StavrosK 4897 days ago
From my limited experience with OllyDbg, it was fantastic.
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borski 4897 days ago
Totally agree - I was just providing an example of a native disassembler that has indications of branching/jumps. I think OllyDbg does this too (at least the margin arrows).
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tptacek 4896 days ago
Check out Hopper.app.
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gsg 4897 days ago
Agreed. I have a flaky emacs hack that colours labels to make it easier to correspond branch with target, but arrows are considerably nicer.
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chetanahuja 4897 days ago
@gsg Would you mind sharing said emacs hack ;-)
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gsg 4897 days ago
Why not? It's a bit more limited than I thought at first, basically only suitable for the output of gcc -S (highlights labels that look like .Lxxx).

https://gist.github.com/4546274

There's no license or documentation, it's flaky and probably broken, etc. Do whatever you like with it.

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