As the most complex of IDA’s modular extensions, processor modules take time to learn and even more time to create, although the use of scripting can ease this pain to some extent. However, if you are in a niche reverse engineering market, or you simply like to be on the leading edge of the reverse engineering community, you will almost certainly find yourself with the need to develop a processor module at some point. We cannot emphasize enough the role that patience and trial and error play in any processor-development situation. The hard work more than pays off when you are able to reuse your processor module with each new binary you collect.

With the end of this chapter, we conclude our discussion of IDA’s extensibility features. Over the course of the next several chapters, we will discuss many of the ways IDA is used in real-world scenarios and look at how users have leveraged IDA extensions to perform a variety of interesting analysis tasks.