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Tenet - A Trace Explorer for Reverse Engineers

<p align="center"> <img alt="Tenet Trace Explorer" src="screenshots/tenet_overview.gif"/> </p>

Overview

Tenet is an IDA Pro plugin for exploring execution traces. The goal of this plugin is to provide more natural, human controls for navigating execution traces against a given binary. The basis of this work stems from the desire to research new or innovative methods to examine and distill complex execution patterns in software.

For more context about this project, please read the blogpost about its initial release.

Special thanks to QIRA / geohot et al. for the inspiration.

Releases

Installation

Tenet is a cross-platform (Windows, macOS, Linux) Python 3 plugin. It takes zero third party dependencies, making the code both portable and easy to install.

  1. From your disassembler's python console, run the following command to find its plugin directory:

    • IDA Pro: import idaapi, os; os.path.join(idaapi.get_user_idadir(), "plugins")
  2. Copy the contents of this repository's /plugins/ folder to the listed directory.

  3. Restart your disassembler.

This plugin is only supported for IDA 7.5 and newer.

Usage

Once properly installed, there will be a new menu entry available in the disassembler. This can be used to load externally-collected execution traces into Tenet.

<p align="center"> <img alt="Load Tenet trace" src="screenshots/load_trace.gif"/> </p>

As this is the initial release, Tenet only accepts simple human-readable text traces. Please refer to the tracing readme in this repository for additional information on the trace format, limitations, and reference tracers.

Bidirectional Exploration

While using Tenet, the plugin will 'paint' trails to indicate the flow of execution forwards (blue) and backwards (red) from your present position in the active execution trace.

<p align="center"> <img alt="Tenet trails" src="screenshots/tenet_trails.gif"/> </p>

To step forwards or backwards through time, you simply scroll while hovering over the timeline on the right side of the disassembler. To step over function calls, hold SHIFT while scrolling.

Trace Timeline

The trace timeline will be docked on the right side of the disassembler. This widget is used to visualize different types of events along the trace timeline and perform basic navigation as described above.

<p align="center"> <img alt="Zooming in on the trace timeline" src="screenshots/trace_zoom.gif"/> </p>

By clicking and dragging across the timeline, it is possible to zoom in on a specific section of the execution trace. This action can be repeated any number of times to reach the desired granularity.

Execution Breakpoints

Double clicking the instruction pointer in the registers window will highlight it in red, revealing all the locations the instruction was executed across the trace timeline.

<p align="center"> <img alt="Placing a breakpoint on the current instruction" src="screenshots/trace_breakpoints.gif"/> </p>

To jump between executions, scroll up or down while hovering the highlighted instruction pointer.

Additionally, you can right click in the disassembly listing and select one of the navigation-based menu entries to quickly seek to the execution of an instruction of interest.

<p align="center"> <img alt="Seeking to the first execution of an instruction" src="screenshots/seek_to_first.gif"/> </p>

IDA's native F2 hotkey can also be used to set breakpoints on arbitrary instructions.

Memory Breakpoints

By double clicking a byte in either the stack or memory views, you will instantly see all reads/writes to that address visualized across the trace timeline. Yellow indicates a memory read, blue indicates a memory write.

<p align="center"> <img alt="Exploring memory accesses using memory breakpoints" src="screenshots/memory_breakpoint.gif"/> </p>

Memory breakpoints can be navigated using the same technique described for execution breakpoints. Double click a byte, and scroll while hovering the selected byte to seek the trace to each of its accesses.

Right clicking a byte of interest will give you options to seek between memory read / write / access if there is a specific navigation action that you have in mind.

<p align="center"> <img alt="Memory seeking" src="screenshots/memory_seek.png"/> </p>

To navigate the memory view to an arbitrary address, click onto the memory view and hit G to enter either an address or database symbol to seek the view to.

Region Breakpoints

It is possible to set a memory breakpoint across a region of memory by highlighting a block of memory, and double clicking it to set an access breakpoint.

<p align="center"> <img alt="Memory region access breakpoints" src="screenshots/region_breakpoints.gif"/> </p>

As with normal memory breakpoints, hovering the region and scrolling can used to traverse between the accesses made to the selected region of memory.

Register Seeking

In reverse engineering, it's pretty common to encounter situations where you ask yourself "Which instruction set this register to its current value?"

Using Tenet, you can seek backwards to that instruction in a single click.

<p align="center"> <img alt="Seeking to the previous register write" src="screenshots/seek_to_register.gif"/> </p>

Seeking backwards is by far the most common direction to navigate across register changes... but for dexterity you can also seek forward to the next register assignment using the blue arrow on the right of the register.

Timestamp Shell

A simple 'shell' is provided to navigate to specific timestamps in the trace. Pasting (or typing...) a timestamp into the shell with or without commas will suffice.

<p align="center"> <img alt="Seeking around the trace using the timestamp shell" src="screenshots/idx_shell.gif"/> </p>

Using an exclamation point, you can also seek a specified 'percentage' into the trace. Entering !100 will seek to the final instruction in the trace, where !50 will seek approximately 50% of the way through the trace. !last will seek to the last navigable instruction that can be viewed in the disassembler.

Themes

Tenet ships with two default themes -- a 'light' theme, and a 'dark' one. Depending on the colors currently used by your disassembler, Tenet will attempt to select the theme that seems most appropriate.

<p align="center"> <img alt="Tenet Themes" src="screenshots/themes.png"/> </p>

The theme files are stored as simple JSON on disk and are highly configurable. If you are not happy with the default themes or colors, you can create your own themes and simply drop them in the user theme directory.

Tenet will remember your theme preference for future loads and uses.

FAQ

Q: How do I record an execution trace using Tenet?

Q: What trace architectures does Tenet support loading?

Q: How big of a trace file can Tenet load / navigate?

Q: I loaded an execution trace, now there is a '.tt' file. What is it?

Q: The plugin crashed / threw an error / is showing bad trace information, what should I do?

Q: Memory in my trace is changing, but there are no writes to the region. Is this a bug!?

Q: Will this be ported to Binary Ninja / Ghidra / ... ?

Q: My organization would like to support this project, how can we help?

Future Work

Time and motivation funding permitting, future work may include:

I welcome external contributions, issues, and feature requests. Please make any pull requests to the develop branch of this repository if you would like them to be considered for a future release.

Authors