MicroAVX - An AVX Lifter for the Hex-Rays Decompiler

Overview

MicroAVX is an extension of the IDA Pro decompiler, adding partial support for a number of common instructions from Intel's Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX). This plugin demonstrates how the Hex-Rays microcode can be used to lift and decompile new or previously unsupported instructions.

There are no plans further develop MicroAVX, or extend its coverage to the complete set of AVX instructions. This plugin is labeled only as a prototype & code resource for the community.

For more information, please read the associated blogpost.

Recently I came across a special binary that was compiled to run on a fixed, well-defined set of modern computer hardware. This rather large binary performs many physics simulations via floating-point computations, emitted strictly as instructions from Intel’s Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX).

While IDA Pro has excellent support decompiling ‘legacy’ SSE (floating-point) instructions, it makes no effort to generate higher level pseudocode for AVX instructions. In this post, we will demonstrate how the Hex-Rays decompiler can be extended to support new or otherwise unsupported instructions using the microcode API.

The practical application of this research has been packaged and released as a plugin called MicroAVX.

Decompiling AVX instructions by extending the Hex-Rays decompiler

https://github.com/gaasedelen/microavx

https://blog.ret2.io/2020/07/22/ida-pro-avx-decompiler/

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