Ghidra - Journey from Classified NSA Tool to Open Source

Black Hat USA 2019

Presented by: Chris Delikat, Brian Knighton
Date: Thursday August 08, 2019
Time: 12:10 - 13:00
Location: Islander EI

This year was a momentous one for the National Security Agency (NSA) as we released our game-changing software reverse engineering (SRE) framework to the open source community: Ghidra. This was a long and arduous process and we want to give Black Hat attendees a chance to hear from two of our experts on how we developed Ghidra, what the tool does, and the process to release it to the public. We will also share some of the insight into what it is like for NSA researchers to interact with the dynamic nature of an open source tool… and the social media attention that it attracts.

Brian Knighton

Brian Knighton is a Senior Researcher at the National Security Agency. He is one of the developers and trainers for Ghidra, the software reverse engineering framework NSA released this year to the open source community.

Chris Delikat

Chris Delikat works for the NSA as the technical lead of a team within the Research Directorate where he is responsible for a wide variety of CNE-related projects. Prior to his work in Research, Chris spent several years as a software developer in NSA’s Tailored Access Operations group. He has over a decade of experience with CNE, including reverse engineering and other related activities. His involvement with Ghidra began back in 2009 and he’s been an avid fan ever since.


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