No Stupid Questions @lemmy.world Cadenza @lemmy.world 3mo ago

NSA and Ghidra

Do people trust Ghidra? How come it's been developed by the NSA? From an outsider perspective, that sounds so weird!

Thanks in advance to anyone able to enlighten me!

8 comments

What is there not to trust? There are lots of disassemblers for binary files. Ghidra just comes with tools to make analyzing the resulting assembly code easier by doing things like graphing the jumps in code, allowing the user to give custom names to variables and functions, and attempting to convert the assembly into C code.

It would make sense that the NSA spends a lot of time reverse engineering programs. Not all hackers share their exploits publically, so one way to find unpublished exploits is by reverse engineering viruses and malware to find out what vulnerabilities are being exploited.
- Yeah but.. isn't it weird that they share their tools then?
  
  I'm not into conspiracy stuff. It's just that when I downloaded Ghidra for the first time, when I saw it was being published by the NSA, I had a "wow, didn't expect that" reaction and it somehow became a shower thought.
  
  It may be important to say that I'm not from the US. Where I live, I'm not sure things like that would happen or have happened. Well, or it did and I didn't really pay attention.
  
  There is always some level of distrust of secretive organizations like the NSA/FBI/CIA/
  
  Usually it's the previous gen / obsolete tech filters out of them, because they do want people to protect themselves a bit. I'd almost guarantee they have better / more advanced tools they aren't sharing.
  
  The NSA has two semis conflicting jobs. They are meant to gain access to foreign adversaries, as well as protecting american interests. Publishing ghidra goes towards the later.
  
  There is also a law in the US that stuff developed by government agencies needs to be open sourced. I can't find the law, but there have been other bits of OSS stuff released by other agencies.
  
  Selinux was developed by the NSA.
  
  They might enjoy the benefits of collaboration. Still the fact they are intimidating you with a public tool is also of benefit to their image as a powerful group. A large part of police work is intimidation.
The problem is the alternative costs thousands of dollars and is out of the reach of some people.
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8 comments