Interactive Disassembler

The Interactive Disassember, more commonly known as IDA, is a popular disassembler used in reverse engineering software. It works on code generated for a wide variety of processors, including the Motorola 68000 and Z80 processors used in the Mega Drive.

Although IDA performs a large degree automatic reverse-engineering to a certain extent, leveraging cross-references between code sections, knowledge of parameters of API calls, and other information, it is focused on being interactive. A typical IDA user will begin with an automatically generated disassembly listing and then rename, annotate, or otherwise add information to the listing, until it becomes clear what it does, creating an effective reverse-engineering.

Although at one time IDA was distributed freely by its creator (Ilfak Guilfanov), it was later turned into a commercial product by DataRescue, a Belgian company, who currently maintains and supports an improved version they call IDA Pro. A license for IDA Pro costs about 450 USD, but it is widely pirated, and at least two freeware versions exist.

External links

• OpenRCE.org: Large collection of IDA plug-ins and scripts
• English-language IDA Pro home page
• Russian-language IDA Pro home page
• IDA 4.1 download - A Windows program that can only disassemble 80x86 code.