sghctoma / ghidra-freebsd

Make Ghidra work on FreeBSD

How to train your dragon... to be nice with the daemon

Although most of Ghidra is written in the platform-independent awesomeness that we know as Java, there are some native executables too - most notably the decompiler. Because of this, you can't really use it on FreeBSD, at least, not out of the box. The native executables work with Linuxulator though, which is a good starting point. So let's make Ghidra work with Beastie!

First step, we need to fix the shebangs:

[0x00 ghidra_9.0]$ grep -Rl '#!/bin/bash' . | xargs sed -i "" 's|#!/bin/bash|#!/usr/bin/env bash|g'

Moving on. Native executables are placed in directories named after the OS and architecture, like so:

[0x00 ghidra_9.0]$ find . -name linux64
./Ghidra/Features/Decompiler/os/linux64
./Ghidra/Features/GhidraServer/os/linux64
./GPL/DemanglerGnu/os/linux64
./Extensions/Ghidra/Skeleton/os/linux64
[0x00 ghidra_9.0]$ ls -l ./Ghidra/Features/Decompiler/os/
total 2
drwxr-xr-x  2 sghctoma  sghctoma  4 Mar 22 10:08 linux64
drwxr-xr-x  2 sghctoma  sghctoma  4 Mar 22 10:08 osx64
drwxr-xr-x  2 sghctoma  sghctoma  4 Mar 22 10:08 win64
[0x00 ghidra_9.0]$

The ghidra.framework.Architecture, ghidra.framework.OperatingSystem and ghidra.framework.Platform classes decide which directory to use. FreeBSD is not a supported platform, so the native binaries won't be found. But exactly because FreeBSD is not supported, the OS name is null, which becomes "null" when concatenated to the path. This means, we can copy the whatever/os/linux64 directories to whatever/os/null for a quick&dirty fix:

[0x00 ghidra_9.0]$ find . -name linux64 -exec cp -r {} {}/../null \;

This works, but it's ugly. More so, Ghidra failed to automatically load external libraries. I did not realize it's a known bug (NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra#110), and suspected the problem could be resolved by patching the Platform.getAdditionalLibraryPaths method. So I patched it, put the class files in a directory that I added to the classpath. And Ghidra still loaded the original classes even though my directory was the first in the classpath. Then I remembered Ghidra uses its own classloader (ghidra.GhidraClassLoader), checked it, and turned out ghidra.GhidraLauncher builds the classpath from several sources. I didn't really want to read the whole thing, so I've decided the easiest way to ensure my classes have precedence is if they have no competitors at all:

[0x00 ghidra_9.0]$ zip -d Ghidra/Framework/Generic/lib/Generic.jar ghidra/framework/Platform.class
[0x00 ghidra_9.0]$ zip -d Ghidra/Framework/Utility/lib/Utility.jar ghidra/framework/OperatingSystem.class

After this, I was finally able to rename those null directories to freebsd64. Of course the library loading still does not work, but I'll just wait for the NSA to fix that.

One additional note before I finish. We have the source code for the demangler_gnu executable, because it uses GPL-d components. It builds on FreeBSD with the attached patch, so you don't have to use the Linux version of that. The ./Ghidra/Features/GhidraServer/os/linux64/libjpam.so is also opensource (gregrluck/jpam), but did not try to build it yet.

So, I guess, that's all. Goodbye, and happy reversing!