Announcement of Google Summer of Code 2018 for the project radare2

This year we decided to resume publishing the results of the previous one and announce the new GSoC for the open source project radare2 on the Habrahabr resource.

Current results

As already mentioned earlier , in 2015, radare2 was not yet adopted as a separate project, but thanks to solardiz and its Openwall project, one of the tasks for radare2 was taken under its wing. After that, starting in 2016, the framework already participates as a separate company. Over the years since the last publication within the GSoC, the following important tasks have been accomplished:

• radeco decompiler (still in development)
• improved Windows OS support
• reversible debugging
• GDB and LLDB remote debugging support
• function argument definition
• WebUI improvement

Additionally, the project was conducted by its own analogue GSoC - RSoC (Radare Summer of Code). One of the differences is that not only students could send applications. Within the framework of this project, the following tasks were performed:

• support FLIRT and YARA signatures
• download PDB debug information
• structure support (similar to 010 Editor)
• parsing ObjC metadata from Mach-0 to define classes and character information

Perhaps this year the RSoC will not be held, but so far the decision has not been finally made.

Project Development Methodology

All repositories are located on github and github issues are used as a bug tracker. Tests are allocated in a separate repository and are performed on Travis CI , AppVeyor and our Jenkins . We also use Coverity to search for bugs, and for various demonstrations - asciinema server.

In addition, several documents were drawn up for those who want to become one of the project developers:

• Contributing guide
• Developers intro

To begin with, to get acquainted with the code base of the project, we recommend those who wish to correct one of the issue marked good first issue .

Required Skills

Most of the radare2 project is written in C, so we expect candidates to be familiar with this PL. But at the same time, some tasks will require Go to create an interoperability platform, Rust for radeco and Qt with C ++ for Cutter. If Radeco has already been mentioned before, then Cutter (until recently, it was called Iaito) was introduced relatively recently and is a GUI for radare2.

GSoC participation

What you need to do to participate:

1. View the rules of participation from Google .
2. Take one of the tasks or offer your own.
3. Write a draft application using Google Docs and our template , and ask one of the tutors to check it out.
4. Submit an application using the Google interface.

To participate, in addition to the application, you will need to send a small pull request to solve one of the microtasks :

• Analysis
• Counts # 6967
• Disassemblers and assemblers
• RAGG2 # 6949
• Refactoring
• Improved Unicode Support (UTF-8)
• File formats
• Debugging
• miscellanea
• Radeco
• Rune
• Cutter

Or you can fix one of the github issues , suitable for the complexity of micro-strokes.

Recommendations for writing an application:

• The application should not be large, just a couple of pages.
• Try to split the period of participation in GSoC according to tasks, and each task into subtasks. This will help not only us to understand how much you are interested in completing the task, but also you will appreciate the task more deeply before starting the execution and prioritize.
• Record how much time per day / week you plan to spend on the project.
• Indicate your time zone so that we can pick up a mentor with a similar one to facilitate communication.
• Please submit your application in advance, not at the last minute.
• You can also choose a “spare” task so that in the event of a conflict of interest (two students choose the same task) it would be easier for us to solve it.

Task list

Within the framework of the Radare2 project, there are several other subprojects: Radeco , Rune and Cutter . Therefore, for each was allocated one task.

• [Radeco] Pseudo-C backend for decompilation - it is assumed that this year the opportunity to decompile the code in Pseudo-C is finally over, using the capabilities of the Radeco analysis
• [Rune] Integration with radeco-lib and radare2 — The Rune library is designed to analyze sections of binary files using symbolic execution
• [Cutter] Add support for debugging and emulation - currently, only static analysis is supported in Cutter, and interaction with ESIL (emulation) and debugging is possible only through the CLI interface.

Tasks related directly to the framework:

• Console interface - to improve the current capabilities of the CLI interface (for example, one of the pranks to add split mode to compare files via radiff2)
• Types - improve support for types and structures (struct / union)
• Parsing EXE / DLL as a FAT file - improve support for macho-format and PE separation (dos, win, .net)
• Support for the Windows platform - includes both fixing bugs when debugging through various protocols (natively, gdb: // and windbg: //), and improving current features
• Platform for real-time interaction - by analogy with collabREate , YaCo and solIDArity projects add an opportunity for joint file reversing, which will help both for analyzing large files and solving CTF tasks in a team
• ROPchain generator using ragg2 - improve the compilation of ROP gadgets and add automatic creation of ROP chains (using SMT solvers, for example Z3 is recommended), as done in ROPgadget

A more detailed summer plan is presented on our GSoC page: rada.re/gsoc
Official site of the project: rada.re

Questions on the tasks or use of the framework can also be set on the #radare IRC channel on the Freenode network or on the telegram channel https://t.me/radare (transport is configured between them).