/YaCo

YaCo is an Hex-Rays IDA plugin. When enabled, multiple users can work simultaneously on the same binary. Any modification done by any user is synchronized through git version control.

Primary LanguageC++GNU General Public License v3.0GPL-3.0

YaCo v1.8.1

YaCo is an Hex-Rays IDA plugin. When enabled, multiple users can work simultaneously on the same binary. Any modification done by any user is synchronized through git version control.

Motivation

IDA does not allow multiple users to work on the same binary. During large malware analysis, we had to use a team of reversers and manual synchronization is a tedious and error-prone process.

YaCo goals are:

  • to support all IDA events (renaming, structure mapping, ...)
  • to be fast (users do not want to wait when working)
  • to prevent conflicts between user modifications
  • to be easy to setup and easy to use

Installation

Debian stretch/x64

YaCo like IDA 7.0 is 64-bit only.

Install dependencies

sudo apt install build-essential git cmake libpython-2.7

Set IDA_DIR & IDASDK_DIR environment variables

export IDA_DIR=/opt/ida7.0/
export IDASDK_DIR=/opt/idasdk70/

Clone, configure & build YaCo

~/YaCo (master) $ cd build
~/YaCo/build (master) $ ./configure.sh
~/YaCo/build (master) $ pushd ../out/x64_Release
~/YaCo/out/x64_Release (master) $ make -j4
~/YaCo/out/x64_Release (master) $ pushd $IDA_DIR/plugin
$IDA_DIR/plugin $ ~/YaCo/build/deploy.sh

Windows

CMake must be installed and in the PATH Only visual studio 2015 & 2017 are currently supported

Configure and build YaCo

set IDA_DIR=C:\Program Files\IDA Pro 7.0
set IDASDK_DIR=C:\idasdk70
build> configure_2017.cmd
out/x64> cmake --build . --config RelWithDebInfo
out/x64> ctest . --output-on-failure -C RelWithDebInfo -j4

Usage

First user

To create the YaCo environment:

  1. open binary or idb file as usual
  2. click on Edit menu, Plugins, YaCo
  3. enter path to git remote (could be a file system path, or empty to use current dir)
  4. a warning will inform you that IDA have to be re-launch with correct idb
  5. IDA auto close
  6. launch IDA for your FILE_local.idb file
  7. save database
  8. start working as usual

Warning, to use with multiple user, YaCo project must be in a bare git project.

Other users

Setup YaCo environment:

  1. clone a YaCo project
  2. open idb/i64 file with ida
  3. click on Edit menu, Plugins, YaCo
  4. a warning will inform you that IDA have to be re-launch with correct idb
  5. IDA auto close
  6. launch IDA for your FILE_local.idb file
  7. save database
  8. start working as usual

How it works

YaCo use a git server to synchronize changes between users.

In the local repository, YaCo stores the original IDB and incremental changes as xml files & commits.

Note that the database is not modified anymore unless you force a synchronisation. When saving the database, we fetch remote changes, rebase local changes on top of those, import this new state into IDA and push this state to the remote git server.

Any git server should work, like github, gitlab or gitea instances.

Currently, YaCo only support SSH authentication. To keep the plugin user-friendly, there is no mechanism which ask for passwords & passphrases on every git operation. Instead, it is recommended to use an ssh agent, like pageant under windows or ssh-agent under linux.

Contributors

  • Benoît Amiaux
  • Frederic Grelot
  • Jeremy Bouetard
  • Martin Tourneboeuf
  • Maxime Pinard
  • Valerian Comiti

License

YaCo is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 that can be found in the LICENSE file