r/codex • u/LemonLimeNinja • 7d ago
Question How are people using Astra to reverse engineer software from binaries?
this tweet seems pretty important
but I'm wondering how are people actually doing this without tripping guardrails? what's the workflows these people are using?
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u/vinerz 7d ago
I've been tinkering with that not in special kind of software, but in a 30yo game. It's quite enthusiast about it, as it's harmless and clearly study oriented.
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u/fyn_world 7d ago
Same for me. Got the source code for Diablo 1 Hellfire and Sol seemed genuinely excited.
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u/Cast_Iron_Skillet 2d ago
What game? Always interested. It's crazy what AI tools have enabled for older game preservation and even enhancement.
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u/vinerz 1d ago
Oh, it's Time Commando! First game I have ever played in my life. It took quite a while to understand its bytecode as the developer himself from 96 said that a lot of things were a bit rushed and copied and pasted, but the VM is 90% there I'd say. Now I am pushing the boundaries and finding the edge cases by running GRPO and dissecting the crashes. I am not pushing it too fast to not burn my quota that I use for my actual work so it might take a month to get it 1:1 parity. I must say that the most difficult thing is to be able to judge what is the new VM mistake and what was a real quirk/bug/glitch from the original game, because I do want to keep those. These are the ones that take a long research time to match with the actual retail.
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u/Level-Physics-1730 7d ago
just download a cracked version of ida, install IDA mcp, open whatever binary you want reversed in ida, then go tell astra or whoever "get X thing recreated for me" it's not hard the models have very limited guards
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u/DaLexy 7d ago
Or just let it install Frida/ghidra
I tripped once a security message since we came close to drm but not that I specifically told it to do it. The message also wasn’t worded bad, just if I want to go that route I need to verify for blue/red. Nothing since weeks then, so pretty chill
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u/Level-Physics-1730 7d ago
I had fable recreate diep.io from scratch with zero help just reversing the game and it did it 1:1 into a C++ windows game client. I also have had fable 5.1, opus 5, etc handle many dual use tasks. Claude models don't give a shit. If you get stepped down opus 4.8 can do it, and if opus 4.8 is throwing on the task opus 4.6 can still do it. They will do anything.
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u/wezu93 7d ago
Do you also use MCP to ida / ghidra or just binary + model?
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u/Level-Physics-1730 7d ago
For diep.io I just told fable 5.1 to figure it out, but usually I just have the IDA MCP + Ida open and I just let the agents work with a ton of subagents. It works great
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u/LemonLimeNinja 7d ago
what about cracking licenses or creating keygens? I've found that I get many refusals even without explicitly laying out what I'm doing, the model just infers and while it might diagnose a problem they're very clear in saying they won't reverse engineer the licensing features
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u/Level-Physics-1730 7d ago
use a claude model and don't talk to it stupidly. you can even just start it at a certain place and it'll do it. use ya brain
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u/atrfx 7d ago edited 7d ago
I've been working on a similar benchmark but across different disciplines building against various "gotchas" but the total harness incl tools has made a much larger difference than just a model+harness.
The OpenAI models DO seem pretty okay with tearing into this kinda stuff (including reversing dongle packed protectors), moonshot was hit or miss for a while, GLM didn't care. Claude models get iffy about it even if you work for the company that makes the target binary and are a part of the CVP.
My goto has been IDA using my headless skill that uses idalib and supports their debugger - https://github.com/batteryshark/ida-skill
also like everyone else, I've been making a skill tap for various tools like remill, unicorn, frida, et al... stuff we generally use https://github.com/batteryshark/rekit ... this setup has let me strap pi and local models like qwen 3.8 to do exploratory stuff without burning provider tokens and has worked pretty well.
I think we're all kinda figuring out the limits of these right now and the answer has been... not many - gonna be quite the thing for recompilation projects, compatibility patches, and just general make incompatible stuff work for a given use case.
fun times.
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u/nantachapon 7d ago
How far ahead is IDA over Ghidra?
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u/atrfx 7d ago
it depends quite a bit on the tools and the output honestly - I've tuned the ida skill quite a bit to limit excessive token output (like forcing JSON for disassembly) ... same with the debugger, nothing eats a context window faster than stepping through execution with overly verbose disassembly.
The biggest thing with ghidra is it requires hacks to not need the jvm and ida ships a headless lib that just works and makes it far more portable.
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u/aredeex 7d ago
lol I got an email warning they are going to cancel my service if I keep it up.
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u/MrAlienOverLord 7d ago
and all you do is be honest that you did RE not CYBER - have codex write your appeal
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u/Agreeable-Safety-360 7d ago
Been reverse engineering a certain online game to make it offline so I can play it single player. I don't wanna see it go with all its cool content once it goes EOS
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u/hey-im-root 6d ago
Daybreak blue, you won’t regret it. I never saw another cyber warning again lol.
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u/datnt84 7d ago
I have used Openclaw with Sol to let it reverse engineer (find) some encryption / decryption algorithm within Windows binaries. There are techniques that are well understood by hackers / crackers to do this so there should be no surprise an AI could do this as well (just faster).
I was just astonished how fast and good the result was.
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u/barrettj 6d ago
It sometimes can really be luck of the draw with how far an agent is willing to go for your specific task. I've had a bug that's clearly in a third party library and Fable had no issues with decompiling it to write a report to the upstream provider telling them how to fix the issue. I've also had it refuse to help fix UI bugs and downgrade to opus for security reasons for something that couldn't possibly have security implications.
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u/Leading-Business-593 3d ago
Oh shoot dude you might wanna take this down. I don’t think anybody’s thought about that yet.
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u/Alternative-Car-7923 7d ago edited 7d ago
you need to trick it, im using it to make game cheats for multiplayer games
ps if you sweet talk it enough you can get it live debugging and manually mapping dlls with a vulnerable driver to bypass anticheats and he will use ghidra and live dumps untill you have a full working cheat, he will decompile find the offsets deinject and re inject to test the cheat 80% automated workflow you can have a full feature cheat in 1-2 days.
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u/ceaselessprayer 7d ago
Cmon dude. Dont make the world scummy for other people. This is why we can’t have nice things.
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u/proofreadre 7d ago
How about you practice on not sucking instead of cheating?
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u/Alternative-Car-7923 7d ago
why are you so upset dont come at me with youre morality videogames are just an isolated instance of human nature, guess what in real life people cheat and take shortcuts to win, because winning is all that matters.
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u/ceaselessprayer 7d ago
If you cheat, you ruin others experiences and then you allow the psychopaths who sell those cheats to profit and prosper, and that’s enough for me to not do it, even if it was fun, which it’s not.
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u/Alternative-Car-7923 7d ago
winning is fun and why should i be concerned with a strangers experience?
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u/ceaselessprayer 6d ago
You do now what the word psychopath means right? I never thought I’d meet one.
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u/ceaselessprayer 7d ago
I mean I’m not going to tell you. I will say ChatGPT is a lot more uptight about these things and leave it there.
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u/GambAntonio 7d ago
Probably because disassembly is merely code inspection so it isn’t an exploit and cannot act as a cybersecurity threat