openreil

[Aerosol]

OpenREIL is open source library that implements translator and tools for REIL (Reverse Engineering Intermediate Language).

REIL was initially developed by Zynamics as part of their BinNavi framework, proprietary code analysis software written in Java. To learn more about REIL read the following documents:

«REIL ? The Reverse Engineering Intermediate Language» (link)

«The REIL language» (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4)

«Applications of the Reverse Engineering Language REIL» (PDF)

«REIL: A platform-independent intermediate representation of disassembled code for static code analysis» (PDF)

However, after Zynamics was acquired by Google they abandoned BinNavi, so, I decided to develop my own implementation of REIL. I made it relatively small and portable in comparison with original, the translator itself is just a single library written in C++, it can be statically linked with any program for static or dynamic code analysis. The higher level API of OpenREIL is written in Python, so, it can be easily utilized in plugins and scripts for your favourite reverse engineering tool (almost all modern debuggers and disassemblers has Python bindings).

OpenREIL is not a 100% compatible with Zynamics REIL, it has the same ideology and basics, but there's some changes in IR instruction set and representation of the traget hardware platform features.

OpenREIL is based on my custom fork of libasmir ? IR translation library from old versions of BAP framework. I removed some 3-rd party dependencies of libasmir (libbfd, libopcodes) and features that irrelevant to translation itself (binary files parsing, traces processing, etc.), than I did some minor refactoring/bugfixes, switched to Capstone for instruction length disassembling and implemented BAP IR ? REIL translation logic on the top of libasmir.

Because libasmir uses VEX (production-quality library, part of Valgrind), full code translation sequence inside of OpenREIL is looks as binary ? VEX IR ? BAP IR ? REIL. It's kinda ugly from engineering point of view, but it allows us to have a pretty robust and reliable support of all general instructions of x86. Current version of OpenREIL still has no support of other architectures, but I'm working on x86_64 and ARMv5.

Please note, that currently OpenREIL is a far away from stable release, so, I don't recommend you to use it for any serious purposes.

Link : https://github.com/Cr4sh/openreil