augur

"In fact, I've actually triggered buffer overflows by just entering my real name."

-- A.

Augur is a blazing fast IDA Pro headless plugin that extracts strings and related pseudocode from a binary file. It stores pseudocode of functions that reference strings in an organized directory tree.

Features

• Blazing fast, headless user experience courtesy of IDA Pro 9.x and Binarly's idalib Rust bindings.
• Support for binary targets for any architecture implemented by IDA Pro's Hex-Rays decompiler.
• Decompilation feature based on the decompile_to_file API exported by haruspex.
• Pseudocode of each function that references a specific string is stored in a separate directory.

Blog posts

• https://hex-rays.com/blog/streamlining-vulnerability-research-idalib-rust-bindings
• https://hnsecurity.it/blog/streamlining-vulnerability-research-with-ida-pro-and-rust

See also

• https://github.com/0xdea/rhabdomancer
• https://github.com/0xdea/haruspex
• https://docs.hex-rays.com/release-notes/9_0#headless-processing-with-idalib
• https://github.com/idalib-rs/idalib

Installing

The easiest way to get the latest release is via crates.io:

1. Download, install, and configure IDA Pro (see https://hex-rays.com/ida-pro).
2. Install LLVM/Clang (see https://rust-lang.github.io/rust-bindgen/requirements.html).
3. On Linux/macOS, install as follows:

   export IDADIR=/path/to/ida # if not set, the build script will check common locations
   cargo install augur
   

   On Windows, instead, use the following commands:

   $env:LIBCLANG_PATH="\path\to\clang+llvm\bin"
   $env:PATH="\path\to\ida;$env:PATH"
   $env:IDADIR="\path\to\ida" # if not set, the build script will check common locations
   cargo install augur
   

Compiling

Alternatively, you can build from source:

1. Download, install, and configure IDA Pro (see https://hex-rays.com/ida-pro).
2. Install LLVM/Clang (see https://rust-lang.github.io/rust-bindgen/requirements.html).
3. On Linux/macOS, compile as follows:

   git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/0xdea/augur
   cd augur
   export IDADIR=/path/to/ida # if not set, the build script will check common locations
   cargo build --release
   

   On Windows, instead, use the following commands:

   git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/0xdea/augur
   cd augur
   $env:LIBCLANG_PATH="\path\to\clang+llvm\bin"
   $env:PATH="\path\to\ida;$env:PATH"
   $env:IDADIR="\path\to\ida" # if not set, the build script will check common locations
   cargo build --release
   

Usage

1. Make sure IDA Pro is properly configured with a valid license.
2. Run as follows:

   augur <binary_file>
   

3. Find the extracted pseudocode of each decompiled function in the binary_file.str directory, organized by string:

   vim <binary_file>.str
   code <binary_file>.str
   

Compatibility

Only the latest IDA Pro release is officially supported, but older versions may work as well. The following table summarizes the latest compatible release for each IDA Pro version:

IDA Pro version	Latest compatible release
v9.0.241217	v0.2.3
v9.1.250226	v0.6.2
v9.2.250908	v0.7.5
v9.3.260213	v0.8.1
v9.3.260327	v0.9.0
v9.3.260421	current release

[!NOTE] Check the idalib documentation for additional information.

Changelog

• CHANGELOG.md

TODO

• Integrate with oneiromancer.
• Allow users to choose to process string cross-references even if the decompiler is unavailable.
• Consider converting traverse_xrefs to an iterative walk to avoid potential stack overflows and infinite loops.
• Consider integrating proptest to complement unit testing.
• Implement functionality similar to https://github.com/joxeankoret/idamagicstrings.