Awesome
What's New
- Improve python plugin load order (prevents crashes when python does not load correctly)
- Add in safe IDA process termination (Special thanks to @tmr232 for this)
What and Why?
This is a plugin to embed an IPython kernel in IDA Pro. The Python ecosystem has amazing libraries (and communities) for scientific computing. IPython itself is great for exploratory data analysis. Using tools such as the IPython notebook make it easy to share code and explanations with rich media. IPython makes using IDAPython and interacting with IDA programmatically really fun and easy.
Example Uses
QT Console
You can just use IPython qtconsole for a better interactive python shell for IDA.
You can also use the QT console to graph things. This is an example creating a bar chart for the occurrences of each instruction mnemonic in a function (in notepad.exe).
Notebooks
Another useful case is using IPython notebooks.
- Function Entropy - Here is an example where we compute the entropy (using scipy stats module) of each function in notepad.exe and graph the result.
- Cython and IDA - Here is an example where we use the cython cell magic to call IDA Api's that are not exposed via IDAPython.
- Sark Snapshots - Example of screen snapshots using Sark.
More examples..soon...
How the plugin works
IDA is predominantly single threaded application, so we cannot safely run the kernel in a separate thread. So instead of using another thread a hook is created on the QT process events function and the do_one_iteration
method of the ipython kernel is executed each frame.
Installation
I suggest using the Anaconda distribution of Python as it comes with all the required python libraries pre-built and installed. To get IDA to use Anaconda, simply set the PYTHONHOME enviroment variable. Alternatively you can install IPython and the dependencies separately.
This plugin should work on all 6.X x86 QT versions of IDA on Windows.
Basic Installation and QTConsole
- Download and extract the release
- Copy the contents of the
plugins
andpython
directories under IDA's installation directory. - Launch IDA.
- At the command line (Windows), start an IPython qtconsole with the kernel instance (outputted in the IDA console) e.g
ipython qtconsole --existing kernel-4264.json
Using the Notebook
- Copy
idc
directory to your IDA directory. (thenothing.idc
script is used to pass command line parameters to the plugin) - Change the paths to the
idaq.exe
andidaq64.exe
executables in thekernel.json
under thenotebook\kernels\ida32
andnotebook\kernels\ida64
directories respectively - Install the kernels using
jupyter-kernelspec install
(e.g.jupyter-kernelspec install --user notebook\kernels\ida64
) - When starting a notebook, choose the
IDA32
orIDA64
kernels, depending on your desired IDA version.
How to Build
- Install cmake
- At the command line cd to the root directory and run the following
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -G "Visual Studio 11" -DPYTHON_DIR="<YOUR_PYTHON_DIR>" -DIDA_SDK="<YOUR_IDASDK_LOCATION>" -DIDA_DIR="<YOUR_IDA_DIRECTORY>" ..
e.g.cmake -G "Visual Studio 11" -DPYTHON_DIR="C:\Anaconda" -DIDA_SDK="C:\dev\IDA\idasdks\idasdk64" -DIDA_DIR="C:/Program Files (x86)/IDA 6.4" ..
cmake --build . --config Release
So far only tested with "Visual Studio 11" compiler.
Changelog
0.5
- Improve python plugin load order (prevents crashes when python does not load correctly)
- Add in safe IDA process termination (Special thanks to @tmr232 for this)
0.4
- Added IDA 6.9 support
0.3
- 2015-10-04: Running the plugin from the plugins menu or view menu will now launch an IPython QTConsole. Consoles are terminated on exit.
- 2015-10-04: Only capture standard output and error when executing the kernel
- 2015-10-21: Improve error reporting
0.2
- 2015-09-30: Added support for Jupyter (replaces original support for IPython).
- 2015-10-01: Added support for ida64.
0.1
- First release
To do/Future Ideas
- More examples
- Create a library for cell/line magic functions specific to IDA