OpenREF
Cody Brocious (daeken) <codybrociousgmailcom> Tuesday, September 13 2005 04:57.36 CDT


I want to take some time to talk about a project which is currently taking up all my time aside from work - OpenREF.  OpenREF is the Open Reverse-Engineering Framework.

The goal of OpenREF is simple: Build a framework which can be used to develop all sorts of tools for analyzing binaries.
Another less general statement is that OpenREF will allow you to build applications like IDA Pro as well as standalone tools and everything in between.

OpenREF is being designed to be fully threadsafe and open-ended.  Far too often you run into issues where the design can only scale to a certain point before you run out of ways to extend that, and the object model of OpenREF should solve these issues.

What follows is a simple explanation of how you would use OpenREF.

First you create an ORDatabase object.  After this, you pass the database to your file loader, which populates the database with file segments.  Next you run your processor module on the segments you wish you analyze.  After this you might run a flow analysis module on the instruction objects generated by the processor module.  Finally, you might run a decompiler on the total output.

The structure of the system is that all object types extend ORObject.  I'm defining base objects like ORDatabase, ORSegment, ORInstruction, ORFunction, ORJump, ORConditional, etc that should be used, but the power is that you can define your own objects and use them how you like.

OpenREF will most certainly be released LGPL, and I'm hoping to have it at a point where loaders and such can start to be written within the next month or two.

If you'd like to ask any questions or have any feedback, shoot me a message, post on the forum, or get in touch with me in the IRC channel.

Thanks,
Cody Brocious

Comments
Posted: Wednesday, December 31 1969 18:00.00 CST