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investigate feasibility of a BinExport2 backend #1755

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williballenthin opened this issue Aug 23, 2023 · 4 comments · May be fixed by #1950
Open

investigate feasibility of a BinExport2 backend #1755

williballenthin opened this issue Aug 23, 2023 · 4 comments · May be fixed by #1950
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enhancement New feature or request question Further information is requested

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@williballenthin
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BinExport is an intermediate representation of disassembly produced by various tools, like IDA, Binary Ninja, Ghidra, etc. The data is stored in a ProtoBuf format: https://github.com/google/binexport/blob/main/binexport2.proto

It includes many of the things that capa needs:

  • instructions
  • operands
  • functions, basic blocks
  • strings

Some other things are missing:

  • section names
  • data references

Investigate the feasibility of building a backend that relies upon BinExport. Consider the tradeoffs of requiring the original file (such as for missing metadata, like sections, or data references) versus self-contained protobuf.
@williballenthin williballenthin added enhancement New feature or request question Further information is requested labels Aug 23, 2023
@williballenthin
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williballenthin commented Aug 23, 2023 •
edited

  • instruction features
    • api ✓
    • number ✓
    • string and substring ✓
    • offset ✓
    • mnemonic ✓
    • operand ✓
    • namespace ?
    • class ?
    • property ?
    • bytes ✗ (but ✓ alongside PE/ELF)
  • function features
    • function-name ✓
  • file features
    • namespace ✓
    • class ✓
    • string and substring ✗ (but ✓ alongside PE/ELF)
    • export ✗ (but ✓ alongside PE/ELF)
    • import ✗ (but ✓ alongside PE/ELF)
    • section ✗ (but ✓ alongside PE/ELF)
  • global features
    • arch ✓
    • os ✗ (but ✓ alongside PE/ELF)
  • characteristic
    • loop ✓
    • recursive call ✓
    • calls from ✓
    • calls to ✓
    • tight loop ✓
    • stack string ✓
    • nzxor ✓
    • peb access ✓
    • fs access ✓
    • gs access ✓
    • cross section flow ✓
    • indirect call ✓
    • call $+5 ✓
    • embedded pe ✗ (but ✓ alongside PE/ELF)
    • forwarded export ✗ (but ✓ alongside PE/ELF)
    • unmanaged call ✗
    • mixed mode ✗

@r0ny123
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r0ny123 commented Aug 26, 2023

Since the topic came up, maybe we consider this one https://github.com/quarkslab/quokka too?

@williballenthin
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Do you use Quokka or know of people that do? Seems very reasonable if so, though we don't want to maintain unused code.

@r0ny123
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r0ny123 commented Aug 30, 2023

Unfortunately, no. You're right that it's still in the early stages and not widely used at this moment.

@williballenthin williballenthin linked a pull request Jan 26, 2024 that will close this issue
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BinExport2 backend mandiant/capa
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@williballenthin @r0ny123