IDA-minsc Wins Second Place in Hex-Rays Plugins Contest

Ali Rizvi-Santiago of Cisco Talos recently tied second place in the IDA plugin contest with a plugin named “IDA-minsc.” IDA is a multi-processor disassembler and debugger created by the company Hex-Rays and this year there were a total of 4 winners with 9 submissions total. Every year, the company invites researchers to submit plugins that improve their products, and Talos determined that IDA-minsc would improve users’ experience enough that it deserved consideration for this year’s awards.

This plugin aims to make it easier for people to reverse and annotate binaries. We believe that this plugin expedites the annotation process and allows the user to work more efficiently. This is done by introducing a few concepts that change the way most users develop Python, which allows the user to treat the parts that they are reversing as more of a dataset that can be used to query and annotate as they see fit. This, combined with the plugin’s various components that automatically determine a function’s parameters based on the user’s current selection, allows the user to very quickly write code that can be used to mark and annotate the different parts of the database.