Rz-Ghidra – Deep Ghidra Decompiler And Sleigh Disassembler Integration For Rizin

This is an integration of the Ghidra decompiler and Sleigh Disassembler for rizin. It is solely based on the decompiler part of Ghidra, which is written entirely in C++, so Ghidra itself is not required at all and the plugin can be built self-contained. This project was presented, initially for radare2, at r2con 2019 as part of the Cutter talk: https://youtu.be/eHtMiezr7l8?t=950

Installing

An rz-pm package is available that can easily be installed like:

rz-pm -i rz-ghidra

This package only installs the rizin part. To use rz-ghidra from cutter, either use a provided pre-built release starting with Cutter 1.9, which bundles rz-ghidra, or follow the build instructions below.

Usage

Usage: pdg   # Native Ghidra decompiler plugin
| pdg           # Decompile current function with the Ghidra decompiler
| pdgd          # Dump the debug XML Dump
| pdgx          # Dump the XML of the current decompiled function
| pdgj          # Dump the current decompiled function as JSON
| pdgo          # Decompile current function side by side with offsets
| pdgs          # Display loaded Sleigh Languages
| pdg*          # Decompiled code is returned to rizin as comment

The following config vars (for the e command) can be used to adjust rz-ghidra’s behavior:

    ghidra.cmt.cpp: C++ comment style
 ghidra.cmt.indent: Comment indent
     ghidra.indent: Indent increment
       ghidra.lang: Custom Sleigh ID to override auto-detection (e.g. x86:LE:32:default)
    ghidra.linelen: Max line length
   ghidra.nl.brace: Newline before opening '{'
    ghidra.nl.else: Newline before else
 ghidra.sleighhome: SLEIGHHOME

Here, ghidra.sleighhome must point to a directory containing the *.sla, *.lspec, … files for the architectures that should supported by the decompiler. This is however set up automatically when using the rz-pm package or installing as shown below.

Building

First, make sure the submodule contained within this repository is fetched and up to date:

git submodule init
git submodule update

Then, the rizin plugin can be built and installed as follows:

mkdir build && cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=~/.local ..
make
make install

Here, set the CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX to a location where rizin can load the plugin from. The install step is necessary for the plugin to work because it includes installing the necessary Sleigh files.

To also build the Cutter plugin, pass -DBUILD_CUTTER_PLUGIN=ON -DCUTTER_SOURCE_DIR=/path/to/cutter/source to cmake, for example like this:

/my/path> git clone https://github.com/rizinorg/cutter
/my/path> # build Cutter, clone rz-ghidra, etc.
...
/my/path/rz-ghidra> mkdir build && cd build
/my/path/rz-ghidra/build> cmake -DBUILD_CUTTER_PLUGIN=ON -DCUTTER_SOURCE_DIR=/my/path/cutter -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=~/.local ..
/my/path/rz-ghidra/build> make && make install

Versioning and Rizin Compatibility

Rizin has a quickly evolving C API so it is necessary to be explicit about which versions of rz-ghidra are compatible with which versions of Rizin:

When using Rizin and rz-ghidra from git:

• rz-ghidra branch dev follows along Rizin branch dev.
• rz-ghidra branch stable follows along Rizin branch stable.

Regarding releases, rz-ghidra is generally released simultaneously with Rizin and often uses the same version numbers (but not guaranteed, do not depend on these numbers!). Also, along with every Rizin release a tag like rz-0.1.2 is created on rz-ghidra, which exactly points to an rz-ghidra release and indicates that this release is compatible with the specified Rizin version. These tags can be used by distribution maintainers to look up how to set up dependencies.