Do people trust Ghidra? How come it’s been developed by the NSA? From an outsider perspective, that sounds so weird!
Thanks in advance to anyone able to enlighten me!
The problem is the alternative costs thousands of dollars and is out of the reach of some people.
ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
What is there not to trust? There are lots of disassemblers for binary files. Ghidra just comes with tools to make analyzing the resulting assembly code easier by doing things like graphing the jumps in code, allowing the user to give custom names to variables and functions, and attempting to convert the assembly into C code.
It would make sense that the NSA spends a lot of time reverse engineering programs. Not all hackers share their exploits publically, so one way to find unpublished exploits is by reverse engineering viruses and malware to find out what vulnerabilities are being exploited.
needthosepylons@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Yeah but… isn’t it weird that they share their tools then?
I’m not into conspiracy stuff. It’s just that when I downloaded Ghidra for the first time, when I saw it was being published by the NSA, I had a “wow, didn’t expect that” reactions and it somehow became a shower thought.
It may be important to say that I’m not from the US. Where I live, I’m not sure things like that would happen or have happened. Well, or it did and I didn’t really pay attention.
CameronDev@programming.dev 2 months ago
The NSA has two semis conflicting jobs. They are meant to gain access to foreign adversaries, as well as protecting american interests. Publishing ghidra goes towards the later.
There is also a law in the US that stuff developed by government agencies needs to be open sourced. I can’t find the law, but there have been other bits of OSS stuff released by other agencies.
Selinux was developed by the NSA.
InternetCitizen2@lemmy.world 2 months ago
They might enjoy the benefits of collaboration. Still the fact they are intimidating you with a public tool is also of benefit to their image as a powerful group. A large part of police work is intimidation.