Ilfak Guilfanov began working on IDA in 1990,[16][17][18][19] and initially distributed it as a shareware application. In 1996, the Belgian company DataRescue took over the development of IDA and began to sell it as a commercial product, under the name IDA Pro.[20][21]
In 2005, Guilfanov founded Hex-Rays to pursue the development of the Hex-Rays Decompiler IDA extension.[24][25] In January 2008, Hex-Rays assumed the development and support of DataRescue's IDA Pro.[26][27]
IDA disassembles a compiled program back into an assembly language representation. In addition to performing basic disassembly, IDA also automatically annotates disassembled programs with information about:[30]
cross-references between code and data in the program
However, the nature of disassembly precludes total accuracy, and a great deal of human intervention is necessarily required; IDA has interactive functionality to aid in improving the disassembly. A typical IDA user will begin with an automatically generated disassembly listing and then convert sections from code to data and vice versa, rename, annotate, and otherwise add information to the listing, until its functionality becomes clear.
Scripting
"IDC scripts" make it possible to extend the operation of the disassembler. Some helpful scripts are provided, which can serve as the basis for user written scripts. Most frequently scripts are used for extra modification of the generated code. For example, external symbol tables can be loaded thereby using the function names of the original source code.
Users have created plugins that allow other common scripting languages to be used instead of, or in addition to, IDC. IdaRUB[31] supports Ruby and IDAPython[32] adds support for Python. As of version 5.4, IDAPython (dependent on Python 2.5) comes preinstalled with IDA Pro.
Debugging
IDA Pro supports a number of debuggers,[33] including:
Remote Windows, Linux, and Mac applications (provided by Hex-Rays) allow running an executable in its native environment (presumably using a virtual machine for malware)
GNU Debugger (gdb) is supported on Linux and OS X, as well as the native Windows debugger
A Bochs plugin is provided for debugging simple applications (i.e., damaged UPX or mpress compacted executables)
The latest full version of IDA Pro is commercial (version 8.4 as of June 2024), while a less capable version, named IDA Free, is available for download free of cost.[34]
The original greyscale version of the logo was introduced in September 1999, with the release of IDA 4.0.[18] Ilfak Guilfanov has stated that the logo is not a depiction of Saint Ida of Louvain.[37]
^Di Federico, Alessandro; Payer, Mathias; Agosta, Giovanni (2017-02-05). "Rev.ng: A unified binary analysis framework to recover CFGS and function boundaries". Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Compiler Construction. CC 2017. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 131–141. doi:10.1145/3033019.3033028. ISBN978-1-4503-5233-8. In an extensive evaluation, we test our [binary analysis] tool on binaries compiled for MIPS, ARM, and x86-64 using GCC and clang and compare them to the industry's state of the art tool, IDA Pro, and two well-known academic tools, BAP/ByteWeight and angr.
^Garcia Prado, Carlos; Erickson, Jon (April 10, 2018). "Solving Ad-hoc Problems with Hex-Rays API". FireEye Threat Research Blog. Archived from the original on June 2, 2022. Retrieved March 12, 2023. IDA Pro is the de facto standard when it comes to binary reverse engineering.
