IDA (Interactive Disassembler) is one of the most used reverse engineering tools. In this blog article, we will focus on how to install IDA on the Ubuntu operating system, but before that, let's talk briefly about why it is necessary to learn reverse engineering.
Malware analysis can only be easy with the necessary reverse-engineering skills, leaving you several steps behind. For those working in the following roles, mastering reverse engineering is critical. For those working in the following roles, mastering reverse engineering is critical:
The Interactive Disassembler (IDA) is a software that converts machine executable code into assembly language source code. IDA supports a wide range of executable formats for different processors and operating systems. It can be used as a debugger for Windows PE, Mac OS X Mach-O, and Linux ELF executables as well.
IDA is commonly used in software reverse engineering, assisting with malware analysis and vulnerability detection, and is regarded as the industry standard disassembler.
The software is available in two different formats, free and commercial. You can find out more at https://hex-rays.com/ida-pro. In this article, we will install the free version of IDA on Ubuntu.
To avoid errors during the installation, we will reinstall libqxcb.so library on Ubuntu.
sudo apt-get install --reinstall libxcb-xinerama0
Then, to install IDA Free on Ubuntu, go to https://hex-rays.com/ida-free/ and download the 'IDA Free for Linux' installation file.
Now, go to the downloads directory and grant execution permissions with the following command to run the installation file we downloaded on Ubuntu.
chmod +x idafree84_linux.run
To start the installation process, just run the following command.
./idafree84_linux.run
After running this command, the IDA installation wizard will appear. You can then press the Forward button a few times to complete the installation.
If there have been no errors up to this point, the installation has been completed successfully. We will now click Finish and complete the installation.
Go to the home directory of the user we installed, and then go to the idafree-8.4 directory to launch IDA. For example, we will run the ida64 executable here and start IDA.
To test if we have installed IDA correctly, let's try to open the 'wget' program on Ubuntu with IDA.
First, let's copy the wget ELF file to any location. In this example, we are going to copy it to the desktop of the letsdefend user with the following command.
cp /usr/bin/wget /home/letsdefend/Desktop
First, open the wget executable we copied to the desktop directory with IDA. Then we can just select the file we want to open via File > Open.
Now that we have seen that we have successfully installed IDA, we can focus on the wget executable Linux file on IDA.
In this article, we discussed the IDA program, what Reverse engineering is for, and who it is important for. Then we successfully installed IDA Free on Ubuntu and opened the wget Linux executable on IDA to see if IDA was successfully installed.
