Crate haruspex 

Vulnerability research assistant that extracts pseudocode from IDA Hex-Rays decompiler.

haruspex

“Hacking is the discipline of questioning all your assumptions all of the time.”

– Dave Aitel

Haruspex is a blazing fast IDA headless plugin that extracts pseudocode generated by IDA’s decompiler in a format that should be suitable to be imported into an IDE, or parsed by static analysis tools such as Semgrep, weggli, or oneiromancer.

Features

• Blazing fast, headless user experience courtesy of IDA 9.x and idalib-rs Rust bindings.
• Support for binary targets for any architecture implemented by IDA’s Hex-Rays decompiler.
• Pseudocode of each function is stored in a separated file in the output directory for easy inspection.
• External crates can invoke decompile_to_file to decompile a function and save its pseudocode to disk.

Articles

• 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/ghidra-scripts/blob/main/Haruspex.java
• https://github.com/0xdea/semgrep-rules
• https://github.com/0xdea/weggli-patterns
• https://docs.hex-rays.com/release-notes/9_0#headless-processing-with-idalib
• https://github.com/idalib-rs/idalib
• https://github.com/xorpse/parascope
• https://hnsecurity.it/blog/automating-binary-vulnerability-discovery-with-ghidra-and-semgrep

Installing

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

1. Download, install, and configure IDA (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 haruspex --locked

   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 haruspex --locked

Compiling

Alternatively, you can build from source:

1. Download, install, and configure IDA (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/haruspex
   cd haruspex
   export IDADIR=/path/to/ida # if not set, the build script will check common locations
   cargo build --release --locked

   On Windows, instead, use the following commands:

   git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/0xdea/haruspex
   cd haruspex
   $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 --locked

Usage

1. Make sure IDA is properly configured with a valid license.
2. Make sure the IDADIR environment variable is set if your IDA installation is in a non-standard location.
3. Run as follows:

   haruspex <binary_file>

4. Find the extracted pseudocode of each decompiled function in the binary_file.dec directory:

   vim <binary_file>.dec
   code <binary_file>.dec

Compatibility

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

IDA version	Latest compatible release
v9.0.240925	v0.2.4
v9.0.241217	v0.3.5
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	v0.9.3
v9.4.260714	current release

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

Credits

This project’s development has been supported by the following organizations:

• HN Security
• Hex-Rays via their Contributor Program

Changelog

• CHANGELOG.md

TODO

• Add global and per-function type extraction (see this issue).
• Add a Semgrep CI regression test to make sure the percentage of parsed lines doesn’t decrease.
• Use the .cpp extension instead of .c to output pseudocode (see this issue)?
• Integrate with Semgrep scanning (see https://github.com/0xdea/semgrep-rules).
• Integrate with weggli scanning (see https://github.com/0xdea/weggli-patterns).
• Improve decompiler output in the style of HexRaysPyTools and abyss.
• Implement parallel analysis (see https://github.com/fugue-re/fugue-mptp).

Enums

ArgHintsMode

Argument name hints mode for function calls in pseudocode.

HaruspexError

Haruspex error type.

Functions

decompile_to_file

Decompiles Function func in IDB idb and saves its pseudocode to the output file at filepath.

output_path_for_function

Builds the output file path for func inside dirpath.

prepare_output_dir

Creates a fresh output directory at dirpath, removing it first if it exists and is empty.

run

Extracts pseudocode of functions in the binary file at filepath and saves it in filepath.dec.

sanitize_filename

Replaces reserved characters in filename with underscores and truncates to MAX_FILENAME_LEN.