MCP Server?

[combs-spacier]

Not sure whether you are interested in that at all, but have you considered providing an MCP Server for AI-assisted usage?

[fadden]

I've seen a few examples where an AI has been used to perform the disassembly almost entirely, e.g. https://bitsavers.org/pdf/apple/adb/Apple/A9M0331/A9M0331_30_dasm.txt . Apparently they're pretty good at figuring out what code does.

Looking around, I see MCP servers for IDA Pro and Ghidra, but I'm wondering if those will even be necessary in a couple of years. This isn't a field I know much about, however.

[combs-spacier]

The reason I'm asking is that I'm actually reverse engineering something ancient, 6502-related for fun right now, with the help of AI, and while it does a good job, it's rather awkward in how it accesses the memory image and the initial disassembly (with lots of my own RE already) I gave it as text file.

Even if it had created the disassembly entirely by itself, there is iterative work to be done on the disassembly text (renaming symbols, adding and changing comments, recontextualizing sequences as data in various representations, or code, ...), and so the AI has to write a lot of awkward awk (hah) and python scripts and similar to access that. Especially because you probably don't want to fill up the context with entire files, when they are pretty big.

I frequently feel that the AI could do a more efficient job in searching for symbols, performing renames, adding comments etc. if it had access to an actual RE tool, instead of doing it via text, hence the idea of an MCP server.

[grue74]

+1 for the mcp server idea, llm:s can be very useful when figuring out the code, but you need to do a lot of manual work to get the best results.

[artgreen]

@combs-spacier, @grue74 - What tools would you want to see and any thoughts on how the agent would approach a task?

[combs-spacier]

I would guess stuff like: Looking up labels, renaming them, changing the "type" of a byte range, looking up cross references and modifying them... pretty much how a human would use it, but the output does not have to be "polished".