Whether through the efforts of the Hex-Rays development team or through user contributions, IDA’s debugger is continually evolving. The best place to keep up with all of these changes is the Hex-Rays blog (http://www.hexblog.com/), where the Hex-Rays developers frequently preview features that will appear in upcoming versions of IDA. Keeping up with user-contributed extensions requires a little more effort. Occasionally, interesting IDA extensions are announced in the IDA support forums, but you are just as likely to see them announced in various reverse engineering forums (such as http://www.openrce.org/), see them entered into Hex-Rays’s annual plug-in writing contest, or simply stumble across them while performing an Internet search.

IDA’s debugger is both full featured and extensible. With both local and remote capabilities, as well as the ability to act as a frontend to a number of popular debuggers such as gdb and WinDbg, IDA offers a consistent debugging interface across a large number of popular platforms. Given the ability to script extensions or build compiled debugger plug-ins, the limits of the debugger’s capabilities are constantly being extended. Among current debuggers, IDA’s debugger enjoys perhaps the most active development and benefits from the fact that all of its core developers are themselves accomplished reverse engineers who share a personal as well as professional interest in making the debugger a powerful and useful tool.