As an IDA user, you may wonder where you can turn for help when you have IDA-related questions. If we do our job well enough, this book will suffice in most situations. When you find yourself needing additional help, though, here are some popular resources:
- Official help documentation
IDA ships with a menu-activated help system, but it is primarily an overview of the IDA user interface and the scripting subsystem. No help is available for the IDA SDK, nor is much help available when you have questions like “How do I do x?”
- Hex-Rays’ support page and forums
Hex-Rays hosts a support page[25] that offers links to various IDA-related resources, including online forums available to licensed users. Users will find that Ilfak and other core Hex-Rays programmers are frequent contributors to the forums. The forums are also a good starting point for unofficial support of the SDK, since many experienced IDA users are more than willing to offer assistance based on their personal experiences.
Questions concerning use of the SDK are often answered with “Read the include files.” The SDK is officially unsupported with a purchase of IDA; however, Hex-Rays does offer a yearly support plan for an annual fee of USD10,000 (yep, that’s right: $10K). An excellent resource to familiarize yourself with the SDK is “IDA Plug-in Writing in C/C++” by Steve Micallef.[26]
- OpenRCE.org
A vibrant reverse engineering community exists at http://www.openrce.org/, which contains numerous articles related to novel uses of IDA along with active user forums. Similar to the forums at Hex-Rays, OpenRCE.org attracts a large number of experienced IDA users who are often more than willing to share their advice on how to resolve almost any problem you may encounter with IDA.
- RCE Forums
The Reverse Code Engineering (RCE) forums at http://www.woodmann.com/ contain countless posts related to the use of IDA Pro. The focus of the forums is much broader than the use of IDA Pro, however, with wide coverage of many tools and techniques useful to the binary reverse engineer.
- The IDA Palace
Though it has had problems finding a permanent residence, the IDA Palace[27] is a website dedicated to hosting information on IDA-related resources. Visitors can expect to find links to various papers related to IDA usage along with scripts and plug-ins for extending IDA’s capabilities.
- Ilfak’s blog
Finally, Ilfak’s blog[28] often contains postings detailing the use of IDA to solve various problems ranging from general disassembly to debugging and malware analysis. Additionally, postings by other Hex-Rays team members often detail some of the latest IDA features, as well as features that are under development.