While understanding existing code during software development or reverse engineering, it is quite useful to be able to quickly see other instances of the same variable or function in the current code view. To enable this feature in Ghidra, I suggest you perform the following two configuration changes:
Under "Edit" → "Tool Options..."
1. select "Listing Fields" → "Cursor Text Highlight" in the tree view on the left and change "Mouse Button To Activate" to "LEFT"
2. select "Key Bindings" in the tree view on the left and assign a key you can easily press to "Highlight Defined Use" ("SPACE" for example)
Happy understanding!
Update (2019-11-22): Actually "Highlight Defined Use" refered to in item 2. of the above list is not the same as the highlighted parts from item 1 :sadkeanu:.
This post is written for aspiring reverse engineers and will talk about a technique called _API hashing_. The technique is used by malware authors to hinder reverse engineering. We will first discuss the reasons a malware author may even consider using API hashing. Then we will cover the necessary technical details around resolving dynamic imports at load-time and at runtime and finally, will described API hashing and show a Python script that emulates the hashing method used in Sodinokibi/REvil ransomware.
Read on
Earlier this year, I was thrilled to hear that my submission for a talk at this year's [FrOSCon](https://www.froscon.de/) (Free and Open Source Software Conference) was accepted. [The talk](https://programm.froscon.de/2019/events/2350.html) is about Ghidra, the reverse engineering tool which was recently release into open source by the NSA. Since I expected a very heterogeneous audience with people from all kinds of industries with all kinds of backgrounds, I decided to give a long introduction with a lot of motivation for reverse engineering and only use the last quarter or so of the talk to actually show Ghidra's capabilities.
You can find the [slides here](https://blag.nullteilerfrei.de/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/FrOSConTalk2019-Ghidra.pdf), the source [of the slides on github](https://github.com/larsborn/FrOSCon2019-Ghidra-Talk) and a recording at [media.ccc](https://media.ccc.de/v/froscon2019-2350-ghidra_-_an_open_source_reverse_engineering_tool). Based on feedback after and during the talk, I added a bullet point under Motivation: a lot of people at FrOSCon seemed to be in the position where a wild binary blob appeared and they had to deal with it. Some because they found an old service running with source code not available (or readable) anymore and some because they want to re-implement a protocol that is not documented.
After a system crash, Ghidra greeted me with the message
Unsupported file system schema: idata