Recently I needed to write a plugin for IDA Pro, and I wanted to do it in Rust. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any good starting points or templates for that. That's how this example came to be.
Before running cargo build you need to specify the path to IDA SDK
in IDA_SDK_DIR environment variable, or hardcode it in build.rs.
This example uses autocxx to automagically generate Rust bindings for IDA Pro. It is an awesome tool but unfortunately it is rather experimental yet and has some bugs. Please make sure you read the autocxx docs!
[!WARNING]
Autocxx has a bug! If you look at build.rs you will see that we don't use latest cargo version of autocxx but a specific commit. This is due to a bug in autocxx-build that prevents us from creating builder multiple times. The fix is already merged, but it is not released yet.
Build script is used to:
File that contains all of the bindings for IDA SDK. This is where you want to add all the types and methods you want to use.
Sometimes a method you want to call can not be generated by autocxx. In this case you could either define it manually using cxx::bridge, or you could write your own method that wraps it and exposes it using bridge.
Just declare your method in bridge.hpp, implement it in bridge.cpp, and include it in bridge.rs.
While autocxx can generate some simple structs and enums, most of them are not simple and would require manual reimplementation. Luckily for us, doing so in Rust is pretty easy.
Just like in a regular IDA plugin, we need to export information about our plugin,
and some methods like init. That's where I do it, but of course you can do it
in any other place.
This is where we override plugmod_t methods for a modern IDA plugin.