YaCo is a Hex-Rays IDA plugin enabling collaborative reverse-engineering on IDA databases for multiple users. Incremental database changes are stored & synchronized through Git distributed version control system. Both offline & online work is supported.
IDA does not allow multiple users to work on the same binary. During large malware analysis, we had to use a team of reversers and manual synchronization is a tedious and error-prone process.
YaCo goals are:
YaDiff is a standalone command-line tool allowing symbol, comment, enum & struct propagation between distinct IDA databases.
There are two major use cases for YaDiff
python $yatools_directory/YaTools/bin/merge_idb.py $source_dir/source.idb $destination_dir/destination.idb
$destination_dir/destination.yadiff_local.idb
and check resultsYaTools is 64-bit only, like IDA 7.1.
Install dependencies
sudo apt install build-essential git cmake python2.7 libpython2.7 libpython2.7-dev
Configure & build YaTools
export NUM_CPU=4
export IDA_DIR=/opt/ida7.1/
export IDASDK_DIR=/opt/idasdk71/
$yaco/build> ./configure.sh
$yaco/out/x64_RelWithDebInfo> make -j $NUM_CPU
$yaco/out/x64_RelWithDebInfo> ctest . --output-on-failure -C RelWithDebInfo -j $NUM_CPU
$IDA_DIR/plugins> $yaco/build/deploy.sh
CMake & Python 2.7 64-bit must be installed and in the PATH Only visual studio 2017 is currently supported
Configure and build YaTools
# export directories without quotes
set NUM_CPU=4
set IDA_DIR=C:\Program Files\IDA Pro 7.1
set IDASDK_DIR=C:\idasdk71
$yaco/build> configure_2017.cmd
$yaco/out/x64> cmake --build . --config RelWithDebInfo
$yaco/out/x64> ctest . --output-on-failure -C RelWithDebInfo -j %NUM_CPU%
$IDA_DIR/plugins> $yaco/build/deploy.cmd
To create the YaCo environment:
Warning, in order to use it with multiple users, YaCo project must be in a bare Git repository.
Setup YaCo environment:
YaCo uses a Git server to synchronize changes between users.
In the local repository, YaCo stores the original IDB and incremental changes as xml files & commits.
Note that the database is not modified anymore unless you force a synchronisation. When saving the database, we fetch remote changes, rebase local changes on top of those, import this new state into IDA and push this state to the remote Git server.
Any Git server should work, for example github, gitlab or gitea instances. Note that some Git hosts have a file size limit, which can be an issue for large IDB files. See #13.
Currently, YaCo only supports SSH authentication. To keep the plugin user-friendly, there is no mechanism asking for passwords & passphrases on every Git operation. Instead, it is recommended to use an ssh agent, like pageant under windows or ssh-agent under linux.
You have a git repository, on github or equivalent
git clone git@server_name:group_name/repo_name.git
plink git@server_name:group_name/repo_name.git
YaCo is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 that can be found in the LICENSE file