gdelugre / ida-arm-system-highlight

IDA script for highlighting and decoding ARM system instructions

Decoding ARM system instructions

This script will give you the list of ARM system instructions used in your IDA database. This is useful for locating specific low-level pieces of code (setting up the MMU, caches, fault handlers, etc.).

One hassle of reverse engineering low-level ARM code is that IDA Pro does not decode the internal registers accessed by co-processor instructions (MCR/MRC and MSR/MRS on AArch64).

After applying the script, the system registers accessed will be automatically commented in the database, as defined in the official ARM reference manuals.

The script will also try to automatically detect the accessed fields for some registers:

Usage

Alt-F7 in IDA Pro, then run the script on your open database.

Compatibility

Should work with ARMv7 and ARMv8 processors.

ida-arm-system-highlight's Issues

script fails to run with 'syntax error'

Windows 10 64-bit
IDA Pro v7.3.190614
Python 2.7.18 & 3.10.5 installed. IDA 7.3 is only capable of Python2.7.

When running the script, the script halts with the error
C:\Users\<redacted>\AppData\Roaming\Hex-Rays\IDA Pro\Scripts\highlight_arm_system_insn.py: invalid syntax (C:/Users/<redacted>/AppData/Roaming/Hex-Rays/IDA Pro/Scripts/highlight_arm_system_insn.py, line 61) Traceback (most recent call last): File "C:\Program Files\IDA 7.3\python\ida_idaapi.py", line 572, in IDAPython_ExecScript execfile(script, g) File "C:/Users/<redacted>/AppData/Roaming/Hex-Rays/IDA Pro/Scripts/highlight_arm_system_insn.py", line 61 *SYSTEM_CALL_INSN, ^ SyntaxError: invalid syntax

It appears this script is not designed for or compatible with Python2.7. I can accept that, but mainly wanted to make others aware of the limitation. I assume to run this script you will need IDA>=7.4, which to my knowledge is the first version that was capable of utilizing Python3.

For sake of completeness, I tried running the script in my Python3 console to see what would happen. I was presented with a different error:
stem_insn.py", line 11, in <module> from idc import * ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'idc'

This would be expected, as the raw Python3 environment would not have the idapython libs provided by IDA>=7.4