Reverse Engineering and Debug Tools

This is a list of more or less known open-source projects useful for all kinds of reverse engineering, code behavior analysis, binary forensics, debugging and so on. I wanted to create a comprehensive list that includes very basic tools, but also some unique, not very popular, yet promising and interesting one-of-the-kind projects. I found it pretty annoying there is no good refernce list like this, and pretty often we have to reinvent the wheel every time we want to complete some obscure task. Unlike some other "rev-eng" lists (e.g. the one at packetstorm), this avoids listing many almost completely similar tools - twenty fuzz tools, fifty gdb GUIs, one million malloc tracers. I am also not going to put tools like source browsing utilities or source analyzers, because they are of very little value in such work, unless you want to find obvious bugs in someone else's sources, which is a whole different issue.

Please mail me with any submissions or corrections at < lcamtuf@coredump.cx>.

 

 1) Name: strace
    Desc: The most basic syscall tracer
    URL:  http://www.liacs.nl/~wichert/strace/

 2) Name: ltrace
    Desc: A popular library call tracer
    URL:  http://packages.debian.org/stable/utils/ltrace.html
 3) Name: gdb
    Desc: The GNU debugger
    URL:  http://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/gdb.html

 4) Name: objdump, strings, readelf, nm, objcopy
    Desc: GNU binutils - standard tools for dealing with executables
    URL:  http://www.gnu.org/software/binutils/

 5) Name: the dude
    Desc: A nice non-ptrace debugger, our savior!
    URL:  http://the-dude.sourceforge.net

 6) Name: bastard
    Desc: Very extensive debugging environment
    URL:  http://bastard.sourceforge.net

 7) Name: PICE
    Desc: Kernel-level symbolic debugger, "SoftICE for Linux"
    Notes: also see kdb ( http://oss.sgi.com/projects/kdb/)
    URL:  http://pice.sourceforge.net/

 8) Name: elfsh
    Desc: ELF accessibility library; not BFD based!
    URL:  http://www.devhell.org/~mayhem/projects/elfsh/

 9) Name: biev
    Desc: The binary viewer.
    URL:  http://sourceforge.net/projects/biew/

10) Name: sourcery
    Desc: A nice cross-platform disassembler
    URL:  http://sourceforge.net/projects/sourcery/

11) Name: LDAsm
    Desc: GUI debugger
    Note: many alternatives: KIDAsm, DDD, xgdb, kdbg ...
    URL:  http://www.geocities.com/rmaxdx/ldasm.htm

12) Name: reap
    Desc: Disassembler, assembly code editor
    URL:  http://reap.cjb.net

13) Name: reqt
    Desc: Binary information extractor
    URL:  http://freshmeat.net/projects/reqt/

14) Name: xtrace
    Desc: C code tracer (for debugging code only)
    URL:  ???
 
15) Name: fenris, ragnarok, aegir, nc-aegir
    Desc: application tracer, its "GUI", and an interactive debugger / GUI
    URL:  http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/fenris/devel.shtml

16) Name: dress
    Desc: symtab recovery for stripped static binaries
    URL:  http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/fenris/devel.shtml

17) Name: ElectricFence
    Desc: dynamic memory debugger
    Note: many alternatives: ccmalloc, debauch ...
    URL:  ???

18) Name: stan
    Desc: binary stream analyzer (good for data analysis)
    URL:  http://www.roqe.org/stan

19) Name: dprobes
    Desc: dynamic probes - debugging facility
    URL:  http://oss.software.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/linux/projects/dprobes/

20) Name: ExecTrace
    Desc: execution path logger
    URL:  http://student.uq.edu.au/~s337240/

21) Name: hex
    Desc: Hex editor
    URL:  http://fly.srk.fer.hr/~senko/hex/

22) Name: sdebug
    Desc: segment debugger for ELF
    URL:  http://xorteam.cjb.net

23) Name: objdump output beautifier
    Desc: self explanatory
    URL:  http://xirr.com/~squeak/objdump-beatifier.html

24) Name: kgdb
    Desc: remote kernel debugging
    URL:  http://oss.sgi.com/projects/kgdb/

25) Name: Linux Kernel Crash Dumps
    Desc: self explanatory
    URL:  http://lkcd.sourceforge.net/

26) Name: ELFIO
    Desc: ELF reader / writer
    URL:  http://sourceforge.net/projects/elfio/

27) Name: SPIKE
    Desc: protocol rev eng tool
    URL:  http://spike.sourceforge.net

28) Name: DCC
    Desc: C decompiler
    URL:  http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~csmweb/dcc.html

29) Name: REC
    Desc: partial C decompiler (assembly language annotator?)
    URL:  http://www.backerstreet.com/rec/rec.htm

30) Name: syscalltrack
    Desc: a nice syscall tracker utility
    URL:  http://syscalltrack.sourceforge.net

31) Name: HT Editor
    Desc: Executable editor / analyzer
    URL:  http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/hte

From: http://blogold.chinaunix.net/u2/86948/showart_1997006.html