elf2json alternatives

LIEF is short for Library to Instrument Executable Formats.

Manticore is a so-called symbolic execution tool to perform a binary analysis. It supports Linux ELF binaries and Ethereum smart contracts. The tool helps with researching binaries and their behavior. This might be useful to learn how malware works and troubleshooting.

This toolkit is used by other software, or standalone. Its main purpose is to parse binary ELF files and DWARF debugging information. This can be useful during malware analysis or troubleshooting issues with programs.

Cutter is a graphical user interface for radare2, the well-known reverse engineering framework. It focuses on those who are not familiar enough with radare2, or rather have a graphical interface instead of the command-line interface that radare2 provides.

PyREBox is short for Python scriptable Reverse Engineering Sandbox. It provides dynamic analysis and debugging capabilities of a running QEMU virtual machine. The primary usage is the analysis of running processes to perform reverse engineering. PyREBox can change parts of the running system by changing data in memory or within processor registers.

Radare2 is a popular framework to perform reverse engineering on many different file types. It can be used to analyze malware, firmware, or any other type of binary files. Besides reverse engineering, it can be used for forensics on filesystems and do data carving. Tasks can be scripted and support languages like JavaScript, Go, and Python. Even software exploitation is one of the functions it can be used in.

The main purpose of BAP is to provide a toolkit for program analysis. This platform comes as a complete package with a set of tools, libraries, and related plugins. There are bindings available for C, Python, and Rust.

BANG is a framework to unpack files recursively and scan them. The files can be firmware, binaries, or malware. The main goal is to scan all files and perform classification and labeling. This way each file can be further analyzed based on the characteristics.

Tools like angr are great for performing in-depth analysis of binaries. This could be the analysis of an unknown binary, like a collected malware sample.

Frida allows developers and researchers to inject custom scripts into black box processes. This way it can provide a hook into any function, allowing to trace executed instructions. The source code is not needed. Frida even allows direct manipulation and see the results. The tool comes with bindings for different programming languages, allowing to interact with processes. Example of the bindings that Frida provides include Python, Swift, .NET, Qt/Qml, and C API.

Searches through binaries and highlights the most important areas with colors.

Supported binary formats:

• ELF 32/64, arm, x86, openrisc
• Mach 32/64, arm, x86
• PE

Both Radare2 and Frida have their own area of expertise. This project combines both, to allow a more extensive analysis of files and processes.