lemonjesus / ixa

A dumb, poorly written interactive (dis)assembler

ixa

ixa is a dumb, poorly written interactive (dis)assembler. Basically I wanted a dumb little tool where I could (dis)assemble one or two instructions in a complete vaccum with zero context for help with reverse engineering stuff. This is that tool.

Build it

You can just use make to build it.

This library requires you have Keystone for assembling and Capstone for disassembling. You can install Capstone through a package manager:

$ sudo apt-get install libcapstone-dev

As for Keystone, you'll have to build it from source. It's inconvenient but not hard to do.

You'll also need GNU Readline. I installed it on my machine like this:

$ sudo apt-get install libreadline6 libreadline6-dev

Use It

Using it is very easy. To assemble, use a:

> a inc eax; mov ax, bx
40 66 89 D8

To disassemble, use d:

> d 40 66 89 D8
inc     eax
mov     ax, bx

To change the platform you're (dis)assembling for, use m. You can use it interactively:

> m
select an arch:
 1 - X86
 2 - ARM
 3 - AArch64
 4 - MIPS
 5 - SPARC
choose: 2
select a mode:
 1 - ARM mode
 2 - THUMB mode (including Thumb-2)
 3 - ARMv8 A32 encodings for ARM
choose: 2
select an endian-ness:
 1 - little endian
 2 - big endian
choose: 1

or if you know the menu selections you want, you can just say:

> m 2 2 1

This program uses eval by christian-vigh to support the c command, which you can feed a math expression and evaluate it. See eval's docs to see what you can put in. It's quite extensive:

> c 2 + ( log(127) / sqrt (5) )
Result = 4.16639

To convert a decimal number to hex, use x:

> x 105
0x69

Future Work

I don't know if I'll spend the time to make it good. It works well enough for me for now, but it could certainly use some improvements:

• I feel like it's not a challenge to make it segfault I've fixed some of these
• I left out PPC support because the keystone header file said it wasn't supported. Is it really not supported?
• Allow for multi-line input (especially for a) I've decided this is a bad idea.
• Have a command history (so when I press the up-key I don't get ^[[A) Fixed with GNU Readline
• Allow for keying through the current entry (so when I press the left-key I don't get ^[[D) Fixed with GNU Readline
• Make the code overall... less trash
• Separate it into files I tried this, it didn't look pretty. Maybe later?
• Add some other small features so this can turn into a swiss army knife of sorts

Who knows if this list will ever get smaller.

License

MIT License