Ghidra is a software reverse engineering (SRE) framework created and maintained by the National Security Agency Research Directorate. This framework includes a suite of full-featured, high-end software analysis tools that enable users to analyze compiled code on a variety of platforms including Windows, macOS, and Linux. Capabilities include disassembly, assembly, decompilation, graphing, and scripting, along with hundreds of other features. Ghidra supports a wide variety of processor instruction sets and executable formats and can be run in both user-interactive and automated modes. Users may also develop their own Ghidra plug-in components and/or scripts using Java or Python.

The latest release includes single-step debugging of a program within Ghidra through a GDB stub or other various debug mechanisms. To celebrate this Wrongbaud’s Blog wanted to review how to build this version of Ghidra and give an example of how to use this debugger on a fun target.

Wrongbaud’s target is the Game Boy Advance game Spiderman: Mysterio’s Menace. The goal is to demonstrate how to properly load this ROM using a custom loader, and connect to an emulator GDB stub using Ghidra’s debugging features.

See more in the post here