The major change:
- New Feature: RetDec is now a library (#779.
- Related changes are the removal of
retdec-decompiler.py
(it is now a binary, e.g.retdec-decompiler.exe
on Windows),retdec-bin2llvmir
,retdec-llvmir2hll
, and some other supportive functionality. - See an example in
src/retdectool
, or an actual implementation of RetDec executable insrc/retdec-decompiler
, to find out how to use RetDec library.
- Related changes are the removal of
Other changes:
- New feature: Use GitHub Actions Continuous integration (#1053, #1125).
- New feature: Add checking for damaged (unloadable) ELF files (#1036, regression-tests #113).
- New feature: Parse various PE timestamps and make them available in Fileinfo (#1035, regression-tests #112).
- New feature: Generate ELF (import) symbol-related hashes, including VirusTotal compatible
telfhash
(#286, #936). - New Feature:
retdec-fileinfo
can be configured via JSON file. See--fileinfo-config
option for more details. - Enhancement: Use Capstone v5 instead of v4 (#1059, #1124).
- Enhancement: Add prototypes for dynamically-linked functions without headers (#1092).
- Enhancement: Handle Procedure Linkage calls for 32bit x86 from gcc (#1088).
- Enhancement: Add DLL name from export directory to output (#1060).
- Enhancement: Updated YARA to
v4.2.0-rc1
(#1061). - Enhancement: Use Authenticode parser library instead of RetDec's own implementation (#1027, regression-tests #110).
- Enhancement: Remove
--backend-aggressive-opts
option and all the related code (#1016, #1032). - Enhancement: Add
SECURITY.md
(#1018, #1025). - Enhancement: Improve PE's .NET parsing - make it more aligned with parsing in YARA (#997, regression tests #106).
- Enhancement: Add
signatureVerified
flag to PE's digital signature entries (#994, regression tests #102). - Enhancement: Add YARA signature for InnoSetup 6.1.0 (#989).
- Enhancement: Provide one-line-style values for digital signature's subjects and issuers (#956, #976, regression tests #92).
- Enhancement: Compute hashes of decrypted PE rich headers (#621, #945).
- Enhancement: Unified logging on stdout/stderr. Added option
--silent
. Printed text is colored only when output is a terminal (#791. - Enhancement: Support all the CMake build types (i.e.
Debug
,Release
,RelWithDebInfo
andMinSizeRel
) on all systems (#774). - Enhancement: YARA updated to version 4.0.1 (#758), fixed Mach-O parsing issue (#283).
- Enhancement: Improved detection of many packers/installers/compilers in
retdec-fileinfo
, including Armadillo (#733), VMProtect (#734, #778), Petite (#735), Enigma (#741), ASPack (#743), Eziriz (#746), PyInstaller (#748), Astrum InstallWizard (#753), AutoHotKey (#756), AutoIt (#757), BAT to PE-EXE script compilers (#761), Bero (#764), CExe (#781), MoleBox (#815), Blizzard Protector (#845), CreateInstall installer (#852), FlyStudio installer (#853), Gentee installer (#855), Ghost installer and InnoSetup (#857, #899), InstallCreator (#804), Quick Batch installer (#864), Wise installer (#865), Viseman installer (#868), Setup Factory (#869), Xenocode Application Launcher #870, SmartInstall Maker (#871), and other improvements (#804, #831). - Enhancement: Enable .NET module in RetDec's YARA (#747).
- Enhancement: Require OpenSSL as a prerequisite. It is no longer built by RetDec (#807).
- Enhancement: Replace RetDec's
FilesystemPath
implementation with C++ Filesystem library (#806). - Enhancement: Added support for Ninja CMake generator (#8, #830).
- Enhancement: Removed copyrights from RetDec's outputs (#843).
- Enhancement: Add
--version
program option to all executable RetDec apps and add this info toretdec-fileinfo
's verbose output as well (#926). - Enhancement: Added support for new ELF UPX unpacking stubs (versions 3.93 - 3.96) (#929).
- Enhancement: Improved YARA rules for detection of the SHA-512 algorithm (#935).
- Enhancement: Improved PE Authenticode parsing (#902, #380).
- Fix: Fix parameter and return types for dynamically called functions (#1085).
- Fix: Disable memory-limiting capabilities on macOS because there is currently no working way of doing so (#1074, #1045, #379).
- Fix: Add OpenSSL 3.0 support (#1040, #1041).
- Fix:
ImageLoader::Save()
properly saves PE's Rich Header and section data (#1028, #1029). - Fix: Check if data is not empty in .NET integer decoding functions (#1030).
- Fix: Stricter validation of PE signatures - they need to be outside of the image to be considered valid (#972, #986, regression tests #108).
- Fix: Do not provide entry point offset in case it doesn't exist (#962, #975, regression tests #101).
- Fix: Fix PE resource parsing issues (#963, #982, regression tests #105).
- Fix: Fix PE imports parsing issues (#1003, regression tests #107).
- Fix: Accept PDB info only if
IMAGE_DEBUG_TYPE_CODEVIEW
flag is set (#1004). - Fix: Prevent PE delayed import parser to load garbage data (#981).
- Fix: Don't detect .NET structures that do not belong to the binary itself, but to the embedded binary (#967, #970, regression tests #90).
- Fix: Fixed handling of escaped characters in PE section names (#958, #979, regression tests #94).
- Fix: Fixed .NET's TypeLib ID parsing - add Parent relationship check (#966, #983, regression tests #96).
- Fix: Make error handling for PE resource directory in sync with YARA - i.e. behave as YARA does (#988, regression tests #98).
- Fix: Fixed memory leak in
Fileformat
library (#951, #984). - Fix: Raise max length limit applied to PE symbol names (#957, #978, regression tests #93).
- Fix: Fixed parsing of junk data from PE resource table's
type
entry (#959, #974). - Fix: Fixed PE rich header analysis algorithm (#973, #960, #965, regression tests #91).
- Fix: Arithmetic shift is no longer converted to signed division as these operations provide different output with negative numbers (#724).
- Fix: Fixed infinite looping during the copy-propagation optimization in
llvmir2hll
(#876). - Fix: Fixed analyzed calling convention on MIPS architecture. Register F0 is used for floating point function return (#656).
- Fix: Fixed filtration to better handle functions with no arguments and therefore to reduce noise in output (#155).
- Fix: Fixed build on some systems by adding missing includes of
<limits>
intoretdec-fileinfo
(#745). - Fix: Fixed two type errors in
scripts/retdec-archive-decompiler.py
(#759). - Fix: Fixed runtime and memory use of
retdec-fileinfo
on PE samples having corrupted relocations (#872, #873). - Fix: Fixed a corruption check for PE samples with invalid import thunks (#897, #917).
- Fix: Fixed recognition of very corrupted PE samples (#921).
- Fix: Fixed the recognition of the "RVA of the import name is invalid" corruption in PE samples (#1063).
- Fix: Fixed parsing of corrupted resources in
retdec-fileinfo
(#907, #911). - Fix: MPRESS unpacker will now correctly copy resources, exports and other non-packed sections correctly.
- Fix:
retdec-fileinfo.py
is now usable even when decompiler is not installed. - ... and many others.
- New Feature: Added support for decompilation of 64-bit ARM binaries (#268, #533, #550).
- New Feature: Added presentation of section and overlay entropy in
retdec-fileinfo
(#502, #507). - New Feature: Added presentation of version info from PE file in
retdec-fileinfo
(#408, #519). - New Feature: Added presentation of thread-local storage directory from PE file in
retdec-fileinfo
(#417, #523). - New Feature: Added presentation of missing dependencies of PE files in
retdec-fileinfo
(#585). - New Feature: Added presentation of anomalies of PE files in
retdec-fileinfo
(#415, #570). - New Feature: Added heuristic detection of StarForce, SecuROM, SafeDisc, MPRMMGVA, ActiveMark, Petite, and RLPack (#600, #607, #615).
- New Feature: Added control flow related information to RetDec config (#646).
- New Feature: Added option to generate the decompilation results as JSON (JSON output file format). This output contains additional meta-information and can be conveniently consumed by 3rd-party tools.
- New Feature: Added a new library called
retdec
that lets you decompile the input into both LLVM IR module and structured (i.e. functions and basic blocks) Capstone disassembly. See theretdectool
demo application. - Enhancement: Improved handling of ELF object files and ELF thunks (implemented in PR #577, solved issues #184, #480, and partially solved #201).
- Enhancement: Demangler rewritten (#95).
- Enhancement: Added macOS and Linux (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora) release builds (#526).
- Enhancement: Added support for using a local repository clone for RetDec external dependencies (#279).
- Enhancement: Parallelized compilation of YARA rules during installation (#540).
- Enhancement: Updated LLVM to version 8.0.0 (#110).
- Enhancement: Updated YARA to version 3.9 (#527).
- Enhancement: Updated OpenSSL to version 1.1.1c (#601). This fixes build of OpenSSL on macOS Mojave (#439).
- Enhancement: Added support for relocations that pair multiple
R_MIPS_LO16
against a singleR_MIPS_HI16
(#627, #628). - Enhancement: Added handling of all x86 FPU instructions in assembly to LLVM IR translation (#394, #643).
- Enhancement: All registers are localized - i.e. transformed from global variables to local variables (#652). This significantly (20% on average) speeds up the decompilation process and greatly reduces noise in output.
- Enhancement: Added CMake options to build and install only specific targets (#510).
- Enhancement: Switched from C++14 to C++17 (#650).
- Enhancement: Replaced uses of
mpark::variant
fromdeps/variant
with standard C++17std::variant
. Removed thevariant
dependency. - Enhancement: Updated Yaramod to version v3.0.0 (#680). RetDec no longer requires Flex and Bison. This fixes #103.
- Enhancement: Take out most of the types from
config
library and place them to a separatecommon
library that could be used across an entire RetDec source base (#686). - Enhancement:
retdec-fileinfo
is now able to produce human-readable representation of a product name and VS version from Rich header (#691). - Enhancement: Added a new corruption check into
retdec-fileinfo
that detects cut or zeroed digital signature (#719). - Enhancement: Reduced RetDec's external dependencies:
- The sources of the following 3rd-party projects were moved from their own repositories directly to the main RetDec repository (to
/deps/
): ELFIO, RapidJSON, TinyXML2. - The sources of the following Avast projects were moved from their own repositories directly to the main RetDec repository (to
/src/
): Yaracpp, PeLib. - The following 3rd-party dependencies use upstream project repositories, not modified Avast forks as before: Capstone, Yara.
- The following dependencies are no longer needed: JsonCpp, Libdwarf, Libelf.
- The sources of the following 3rd-party projects were moved from their own repositories directly to the main RetDec repository (to
- Enhancement: Implemented proper RetDec installation (#648). It is now possible to easily use RetDec components in other CMake projects.
- Enhancement: Some optimizations in critical RetDec components (#731). It is however still often very slow on big inputs.
- Fix: Increased the limit for the number of entries in import directory when deciding whether a PE file is corrupted or not (avast/pelib#13).
- Fix: Fixed build on BSD systems (#598).
- Fix: Resources which are located in the different section than resource tree are now properly parsed (#596).
- Fix: Version information which contained strings shorter than reported are now properly parsed (#596).
- Fix: Fixed crashes of
retdec-fileinfo
when analyzing ELF samples containing invalid ranges (#521). - Fix: Fixed crashes of
retdec-unpacker
when trying to unpack corrupted ELF samples having incorrect size of additional data (#582). - Fix: Fixed several Mach-O parsing crashes (#581, #561, #568).
- Fix: Fixed import table hashes computation - hashes are no longer produced from empty strings (#460).
- Fix: Fixed build on Microsoft Windows via MSYS2 (#606).
- Fix: Fixed build on macOS Mojave by updating OpenSSL and using
xcrun
(#439). - Fix: Fixed computation of the "RVA of the import name is invalid" loader error (avast/pelib#11).
- Fix: Fixed computation of the "Import directory is cut" loader error (avast/pelib#17).
- Fix: Export ordinals are now correctly calculated as relative to the base (#612, avast/pelib#10).
- Fix: Fixed crash in the decoding phase (#637, #641).
- Fix: Fixed global variable naming issue (#636, #645).
- Fix: Fixed binary to LLVM IR translation of some MIPS instructions (#633), and made the translation process less error prone altogether (#672).
- Fix: Fixed incorrect translation of PHI nodes in
llvmir2hll
(#658). - Fix: Fixed the build of LLVM when having OCaml installed in your system (#701).
- New Feature: Added basic support of 64-bit x86 architecture (#9, #513).
- New Feature: Added presentation of imported types and TypeRef hashes for .NET binaries (#363, #364, #428).
- New Feature: Added presentation of metadata from binaries written in Visual Basic and detection of P-code (#138, #440).
- New Feature: Added computation and presentation of icon hashes for exact and also similarity matching in PE files (#339).
- Enhancement: Distribute YARA rules in a text form in the RetDec support package (retdec-support #3).
- Enhancement: Updated YARA to version 3.8.1 (#218).
- Enhancement: Made
--generate-log
option ofretdec-decompiler.py
work on macOS (#383, #450). - Enhancement: Replaced recursion with iterative implementation in x87 FPU analysis in
retdec-bin2llvmir
(#450). - Enhancement: The
new
LLVM IR to BIR converter is now the default (and only) back-end's converter. In most cases, this improves code structure and significantly speeds up decompilations (#211, #508, #509). - Enhancement: The
fileformat
library, and all its object file modules, accept bothstd::istream
and(data, size)
pair, in addition to the original input file path. - Enhancement: Reduced the needed stack space in
retdec-llvmir2hll
(#492, #495). - Enhancement: Added support for build and run on FreeBSD and potentially on other BSD OSes (#476).
- Enhancement: It is possible to use local PeLib directory instead of remote revision via CMake variable
PELIB_LOCAL_DIR
. This is convenient when modifying both PeLib and RetDec at the same time. - Enhancement: Improved detection of needed libraries and imported/external functions in ELF binaries (#457).
- Enhancement: Added semantics for more MIPS instructions.
- Enhancement: Capstone2LlvmIr library refactoring (#115).
- Enhancement: Removed the build and runtime dependency on ncurses/libtinfo (#409).
- Enhancement: Add a check into our scripts that they are run from an installation directory and not from the
scripts
directory (#418). - Enhancement: Improved corruption checks in
retdec-fileinfo
to recognize cut PE files which are still loadable (#463). - Enhancement: Redesign output files naming scheme (#132).
- Fix: Fixed false COFF file format detections (#421, #431).
- Fix: Fixed LLVM IR syntax error:
Global variable initializer type does not match global variable type
(#436). - Fix: Fixed translation of x86
sbb
instruction (#401). - Fix: Fixed
fileinfo
crash duringAsn1Sequence
initialization when parsing PE certificates (#256). - Fix: Fixed
fileinfo
crash during reconstruction of .NET types (#458, #511). - Fix: Fixed generation of MIPS branch instructions (#88).
- Fix: Fixed generation of empty if blocks in C output (#83).
- Fix: Fixed decompilation of simple x86 system calls (#24).
- Fix: Fixed potential infinite looping in llvmir2hll's copy propagation pass (#479).
- Fix: Fixed
FilesystemPath::isFile()
(#490, #491). - Fix: Fixed
retdec-signature-from-library-creator.py
when there is a lot of input files by adding an option toretdec-bin2pat
to have the objects list passed through a text file instead of via program arguments (#472, #484). - Fix: Stricter rules for PE section names (#451).
- Fix: Fixed incorrect return code of
bin2pat
that causedsignature-from-library-creator.py
to silently fail on error (#473, #474). - Fix: Fixed installation when Python is in a path containing spaces (#441).
- Fix: Fixed handling of pointers with segment overrides, including loads/stores from/to zero (null) pointers (#41, #169, #347, #376, #391).
- Fix: Fixed translation of x86 FPU instructions to LLVM IR (#293).
- New Feature: Converted shell scripts to Python scripts so that Windows users no longer have to install MSYS2 in order to run RetDec (#338, #147).
- New Feature: Added generation of export-table hashes into
retdec-fileinfo
(#121, #321). - New Feature: Automatically generate and publicly host an up-to-date Doxygen documentation (#20).
- Enhancement: Suppress superfluous ranlib warnings about static libraries having no symbols on macOS (#271, #349).
- Fix: Fixed assertions in statically linked code recognition (#333).
- Fix: Fixed aborts due to assertions during decoding of some MIPS binaries (#335).
- Fix: Fixed a memory leak when parsing Mach-O files (#331).
- New Feature:
retdec-fileinfo
is now able to detect when a PE file is corrupted and cannot be loaded (#281). - New Feature: Added a new tool:
retdec-getsig
. It can be used for creating signatures of packers, compilers, and other tools. - New Feature: The number of bytes read from the input file's entry point by
retdec-fileinfo
is now configurable with the--ep-bytes
option. - Enhancement: Complete rewrite of binary to LLVM IR decoding phase (#116).
- Enhancement: Added reference checks to statically linked code detection (#113).
- Enhancement: Speeded up RetDec rebuild and installation by disabling forced reconfiguration of LLVM (#294).
- Enhancement: Added new OS/ABI and tool detections for ELF files (#244).
- Enhancement: Improved support for analysis of ELF core files by
retdec-fileinfo
(#142). - Enhancement: Added support for limiting overall memory when running decompilations and tools (#270, #290). By default, decompilations are now run with limited memory (half of system RAM) to prevent "black screens" (mostly on Windows). Use
--no-memory-limit
to override. - Enhancement: On macOS, you no longer need to have GNU coreutils in
PATH
to build and install RetDec. GNU coreutils are still needed to run RetDec, though. - Enhancement: Import-table hashes generated by
retdec-fileinfo
are now compatible with import-table hashes from YARA/pefile (#246). - Enhancement: Tool
retdec-macho-extractor
can now extract objects from non-archive Mach-O universal binaries (#125). - Enhancement: References to ticket numbers from our internal issue tracking system were replaced by short descriptions in the
retdec-regression-tests
repository (retdec-regression-tests #1). - Enhancement: Added a missing license for the
retdec-support
repository (retdec-support #1). - Enhancement: Better detection of tools: new signatures and heuristics. YARA signatures are compiled now.
- Enhancement: Added Travis and AppVeyor continuous integration builds (#2).
- Enhancement: Build with
-std=c++14
instead of-std=gnu++14
with GCC on Linux (#76). - Enhancement: Speeded up build by skipping compilation of unnecessary dependencies (e.g. unused LLVM libraries, tools, and examples).
- Enhancement: OpenSSL is now automatically built only if it is not found in your system.
- Enhancement: Added support for a system-wide installation (#94).
- Enhancement: Prefixed all the installed binaries and scripts with
retdec-
(#70). Also, some tools were renamed to make their names more uniform. - Enhancement: Got rid of all git submodules (#92, #93). Moved sources of all RetDec-related repositories to this main repository. Third-party dependencies are downloaded and built via CMake's external projects. This allows us to have e.g. only a single copy of LLVM (#14) and not require a recursive clone (#48, #68, #72).
- Enhancement: Set a proper
rpath
during installation on Linux and macOS (#77, #100). This allows us to move the installation directory after the installation into another location. - Enhancement: Added community support for building and running RetDec inside Docker (#60).
- Enhancement: Decrease the default timeout when downloading the support package during installation (#6).
- Enhancement: Any shell can be used to install the decompiler, not just Bash.
- Enhancement: Added unofficial support for macOS build (#7).
- Enhancement: Allow 32b versions of
bin2llvmir
andllvmir2hll
on Windows access more memory (#7). - Enhancement: Added a method in
loader::Image
to obtain segment content as a raw data pointer. - Enhancement:
retdec-fileinfo
now prints raw bytes of Rich Header in the JSON format (#288). - Enhancement: Delayed imports in PE files are now distinguished from non-delayed imports in the output from
retdec-fileinfo
by a boolean flag (#287). - Fix: Add a missing
.c
extension to files generated byretdec-archive-decompiler.sh
(#261. - Fix: Fixed build of yaracpp on 32b Unix-like operating systems (#299).
- Fix: Fixed parsing of PE files having corrupted import tables (#101).
- Fix: Fixed parsing of delayed imports by ordinals in PE files (#282).
- Fix: Fixed ordering of detected tools (e.g. compilers and packers) on systems whose
std::sort()
is not stable (#262). - Fix: When running RetDec on macOS,
gtimeout
is now used instead oftimeout
(#260). This fixes the following runtime error when runningretdec-archive-decompiler.sh
:The
timeoutcommand is required but it is not available
. - Fix: When running RetDec on macOS,
greadlink
is now used instead ofreadlink
. This fixes runtime errors of the formreadlink: illegal option -- e
. - Fix:
retdec-decompiler.sh
on macOS no longer requires the GNU version ofsed
(#257). - Fix:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
is now used instead of#!/bin/bash
to run our scripts (#258). - Fix: Fixed
retdec-fileinfo
crashes when verifying digital signature of PE files (#87). - Fix: Fixed infinite loop in COFF word length detection for rare cases (#242).
- Fix: Fixed several ELF bugs causing crashes (#239, #240, #241, #248).
- Fix: Fixed unit-tests discovery in
retdec-tests-runner.sh
on macOS (#238). - Fix: Non-printable characters in ELF .dynamic section output are now replaced with hexadecimal codes (#82).
- Fix: Fix for several segmentation faults in ELF parsing module (#89).
- Fix: Added a workaround for a GCC 5 compilation bug (#231).
- Fix: Fix LLVM (and therefore RetDec) build on systems with architecture other than x86 (llvm #3).
- Fix: Valid Mach-O x64 relocations are no longer ignored.
- Fix: Only a single copy of LLVM (and all other components) is kept (#14).
- Fix: RetDec works even if it is installed to a directory which have whitespaces in its path.
- Fix: Reduced the length of build paths to external projects (#61).
- Fix: Build of
googletest
with VS 2017 (#55). - Fix: Build of
retdec-config
when two different compilers are employed (#52). - Fix: Build of the
llvm
submodule with VS 2017 when DIA SDK is installed (#61). - Fix: Ordering of compiler detections (#39).
- Fix: Remove duplicate
lib
prefix when installing libdwarf libraries (#31). - Fix: When installing the decompiler, do not remove the entire
share
directory (#12). - Fix: Improve OS type detection when installing the decompiler.
- Fix: Remove useless OS type detection when running decompilations (#10).
- Fix: Filesystem path in utils now returns correct information when it is appended with another path.
- Fix: Plain output of
fileinfo
now escapes non-printable characters in subject/issuer name/organization of PE certificates (#253). - Fix: Invalid dates are no longer shown in the output of
fileinfo
(#251). - Fix: Fixed crash of
fileinfo
when accessing slightly corrupted security directory (#255, #250). - Fix: Delayed imports are now ignored when calculating import-table hashes for PE files (#287).
- Fix: Import-table hashes for Mach-O binaries are now always generated even if commands for library loading are not ordered (#285).
- Fix: OpenSSL can now be built on ARM architectures (Linux and Windows) and other non-recognized architectures (Linux only) (#299).
- Fix: Decompilation in raw mode (
--mode raw
) no longer removes the original input file when cleanup option is used (--cleanup
) (#309). - Fix: Retdec can now be cross-compiled (yaracpp #2).
Initial public release.