Getting Started with Ghidra

Chapter 4. Next Steps

Now that you have made it a couple of steps up the ladder toward a better understanding of Ghidra, you may be wondering where you can go from here. Well, for a start, you can take the source code you will find in Appendix A and compile it yourself. The source code is a portion of an implementation of Conway’s Game of Life. You’ll be able to follow along with what you saw earlier when you looked at the assembly code and also the different sections of the CodeBrowser. Additionally, you can compile it using a couple of different compilers. Another feature you can look at is to see how the compiled program differs when you make changes. Figure 4-1 shows differences in the program when a new function is added. You are looking at the same section of the program in both of the lefthand windows. The difference is that in the far left, the new function is in place. It’s not there in the middle pane.

Any change you make in the program can be viewed as a difference. The one thing you don’t want to do is try to run program differences against two instances of the programs that have been run through two separate compilers. What you are looking at is not apples being compared with apples. Maybe you are looking at apples on the one hand. You are maybe comparing a Red Delicious against a Granny Smith though. They do the same thing but don’t look much like each other. Since the program comparison is looking at the same sections of a program by memory address, you aren’t going ...