AI Summary: The hrtng IDA plugin provides a suite of tools designed to enhance the reverse engineering process within the IDA Pro environment, specifically leveraging the Hex-Rays decompiler. Its notable features include automation of variable renaming, interactive pseudocode transformations, various decryption capabilities, and assistance with obfuscated code analysis, all aimed at improving the efficiency and accuracy of binary analysis tasks. The plugin integrates seamlessly into IDA’s existing functionality, offering a structured approach to handling complex code scenarios.

README

hrtng IDA plugin

hrtng IDA plugin is a collection of tools, ideas and experiments I’ve found interesting and useful in my reversing work.

Special thanks to following peoples for their great plugins were used as base for my work:

• Hex-Rays SA ida-sdk examples
• Milan Bohacek, hexrays_tools and hexrays_hlight
• J.C. Roberts and Alexander Pick: IDB2PAT
• HexRaysDeob by Rolf Rolles and Takahiro Haruyama
• Karthik Selvaraj Krypton plugin
• Ali Rahbar, Ali Pezeshk and Elias Bachaalany GraphSlick plugin
• Markus Gaasedelen AVX support for the Hex-Rays x64 Decompiler

The plugin requires Hex-Rays decompiler presence in your IDA installation.
Only latest version of IDA is supported and evolves. However the plugin can be compiled with IDA SDK >= 7.3 New features and fixes added for the current IDA usually not well tested with old versions.

Features of the plugin:

There is no one place in menu where all functionality of the plugin grouped together. The plugin’s menu items placed closer to logically related standard IDA & Hex-Rays decompiler functions. Messages, menu items, popup windows and dialog boxes belong to this plugin are marked with “[hrt]” prefix.

Automation

• Pull up comments from disasm to pseudocode view
• Automatic renaming local and global variables, struct members
• Automatic enum substitution
• COM helper

Interactive pseudocode transformation

• User interactive renaming/retyping assistance
• Assists with changing type of structure member or local/global variable
• Invert “if” statement
• reinterpret_cast
• Collapse selection
• “offsetof” convertor

Decryption

• Strings/data/const decryption
• Build stack strings (optionally with decryption)
• Build array strings (optionally with decryption)
• Mass strings decryption

Deal with obfuscated code

• Decompile obfuscated code
• Hidden variable assignments
• Scan for API names hashes
• Unflattening
• Microcode optimizers / “Magic” calls

Code recognition

• Microcode signatures
• De-Inline - detection of inlined functions
• Create patterns (PAT) file from IDA database

Type management assistance

• Create dummy structs
• Assist split gaps in structures
• Union creation for a variable is reused with different types
• List of structures with given size, with given offset
• Assist in creation of new structure definitions
• Finds structures with same “shape” as is used
• New functionality in Structures view
• IDC script for interactive merging types across multiple IDBs

Virtual/indirect calls assistance

• Virtual calls assistance
• Jump to indirect call destination
• Fix stack pointer for indirect call

Function name and type

• Smart rename func
• Convert function to __usercall, detect spoiled registers
• Import user named functions prototypes into the local type library
• Set calling conventions bit closer to Go-lang
• Remove function’s return type converting it to void func(…)
• Remove function’s argument

IDA UI improvements

• Extended xrefs
• Matching brace highlight
• Auto turn on ‘Functions’ window content synchronisation
• Render markdown content of “IDA notepad” in a docked viewer

Misk features

• Get API help
• AVX lifter
• Dump strings, comments and names from the IDA database
• Offsets table creation
• Print reversing progress percent on a proc renaming
• Recursively decompile callees
• Refactoring (global Find and Replace)
• Deal with structures with negative offsets or access based on offsets in a middle of structure

Patching

• Patch custom area with NOPs
• Patch from debugger / Patch from file
• Search & Patch
• Create patched (DEC) file

IDA plugin developer help

• Microcode Explorer
• Ctree graph

Media

Reversing FinSpy

• securelist - Our secret ingredient for reverse engineering (EN)
• Хабр - Cекретный ингредиент для реверс-инжиниринга: как работает наш собственный опенсорс-плагин для IDA (RU)
• Positive Hack Days Fest 2025 - Наш секретный ингредиент для реверс-инжиниринга (RU)
• Off-By-One 2025 - Speed up your reverse engineering with the hrtng plugin (EN)

Analyzing PlugX

• SSTIC 2025 - Analysez des logiciels malveillants plus rapidement avec hrtng (FR)

Building

• Clone hrtng together with Crypto++® Library CMake submodule. Or put manually downloaded cryptopp-cmake source code to hrtng/src/cryptopp-cmake folder.

cd src
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/KasperskyLab/hrtng.git

• Copy IDA_DIR/plugins/hexrays_sdk/include/hexrays.hpp file to the include directory of the IDA SDK. (Not necessary since IDA 9.0/8.5)
• Edit hrtng/src/CMakeLists.txt file to set correct path and version of used IDA SDK. To build later with another SDK version you may change cmake’s IDASDK_VER variable with using cmake -D, ccmake or cmake-gui tools.
• Create build directory, go into it, configure and build cmake project

mkdir bld && cd bld
cmake <path-to/hrtng/src>
cmake --build . --config Release -j 4 --clean-first

• On the first build attempt with IDA SDK before version 9.1 there will be compiling error looks like:

hrtng/src/deob.cpp:912:60: error: ‘class rangeset_t’ has no member named ‘as_rangevec’
     fc.create("tmpfc2", ranges.as_rangevec(), 0);//!!! add line into range.hpp, class rangeset_t: "const rangevec_t &as_rangevec() const { return bag; }"

• To fix the error, edit IDA_SDK/include/range.hpp file, adding line with as_rangevec function implementation into class rangeset_t declaration as in the following example:

class rangeset_t
{
  rangevec_t bag;
  ...
  public:
  const rangevec_t &as_rangevec() const { return bag; }
  ...
};

• Copy built binaries into IDA_DIR/plugins folder together with apilist.txt and literal.txt files from hrtng/bin/plugins
• Profit

License

This program is released under GPL v3 license

Author

• Sergey.Belov at kaspersky.com