ghidra
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Ghidra is a software reverse engineering (SRE) framework
Summary
Ghidra is an open-source software reverse-engineering framework, free to use, originally created and maintained by the NSA's Research Directorate. It runs as a desktop application on Windows, macOS, and Linux, offering disassembly, decompilation, graphing, and scripting against compiled binaries across a wide range of processor architectures and executable formats, with a headless mode for scripted, automated analysis. It is aimed at malware analysts and vulnerability researchers who need to understand compiled code rather than source, and users can extend it with their own scripts or plugins in Java or Python. With 450 contributors, over a thousand commits in the past year, and a release 77 days ago, the project is actively maintained.
Ghidra is a software reverse engineering (SRE) framework
How ghidra helps
What functions does this unlabeled binary actually perform?
disassembles and decompiles the compiled code into readable, C-like pseudocode and control-flow graphs, without needing the original source
Which processor architecture and executable format am I actually dealing with?
recognizes a wide range of instruction sets and binary formats and loads the file accordingly, so the same framework applies whether the sample is an ELF, PE, or something more obscure
Can I check hundreds of binaries for the same vulnerable pattern without opening a GUI for each one?
runs the same analysis in a headless mode driven by a script, applying identical disassembly and decompilation logic across a batch of files
How do I teach the tool to spot a pattern specific to my own investigation?
accepts custom scripts or extensions written in Java or Python that run against the loaded binary's disassembly and decompilation output
Did a vendor's build actually change between two versions, beyond the version string?
decompiles both binaries independently and lets the analyst diff the resulting pseudocode and call graphs to see what logic moved, changed, or disappeared
Languages
Command line
| option | found in | since | description |
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Values are placeholders taken from each option’s declared default. Nothing is executed here — the output shown is a recording of a run that already happened.
Score card
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Shipping velocity releases a month, last 12 months
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Documentation quality release-notes rubric, 0–100
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Breaking-change discipline how rarely a release breaks users, and notice given
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Maintenance risk quiet time against its own cadence, maintainers
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Innovation & surface new capabilities, API and MCP surface
- Community health
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Contributor trend distinct committers, this year against last
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Maintainer concentration bus factor now against a year ago
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Issue backlog trend issues closed per issue opened, 12 months
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Responsiveness median time to a maintainer’s first reply
Nine scores for ghidra, each built from the releases, notes and API history this site tracks — and, on Researcher and Business, where it stands among every measured tool in its category and how that has moved.
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Blank means never measured; nothing here is a filled-in zero.
Peer standings are included with Researcher and Business. See how this tool ranks against its competitors, using data we don't publish anywhere else.
See plans →Each score is 0–100 on a published rubric, derived from data this site already shows. A dimension we cannot measure says so — it is never scored 0 and never enters a rank.
How this is scored
- Shipping velocity — releases a month over the last 12 months, on a log scale where 16 a month scores 100. Needs 3 releases in the window.
- Documentation quality — the release-notes rubric published on the analytics page, unchanged.
- Breaking-change discipline — the share of releases carrying a breaking change (none scores 100, half or more scores 0). Only projects that label breaking changes are measured: a clean record cannot be told from an unlabelled one.
- Maintenance risk — quiet time measured against the tool's own release cadence (quiet longer than 90 days and three typical gaps scores 0), plus the number of active maintainers and whether contributors are growing, where known. Higher is lower risk.
- Innovation & surface — new capabilities in the feature ledger this year, API and MCP operations added, and the share of commits that are features: the mean of whichever we hold.
- Community health (open-source tools only) — each is a direction, not a size: contributors this year against last, the bus factor now against a year ago, and issues closed per issue opened, where steady scores 50, doubled 100 and halved 0; plus the median time to a maintainer's first reply (an hour scores about 100, a month or more 0). A commercial card has no repository and carries none of the four.
- Documented delivery (commercial tools) — when a vendor's documented new capabilities have slowed against its own baseline, that counts against the overall standing as heavily as two low dimensions. Steady delivery, or too little history to judge, leaves the standing alone; it is never a sixth score.
- Open-source tools are scored on repository signals; commercial tools on their published changelog. Ranks compare tools within one category and one profile and need at least five measured peers; the overall standing needs three ranked dimensions. Best-in-breed or consolidator is a shape, not a quality, and is never scored.
Release-note detail over time
See how much detail ghidra puts in its release notes, quarter by quarter, and compare it with tracked tools in the same category. This history uses up to ten retained, reviewed notes per tool; sparse or blank older quarters may reflect that limit.
Checking release-note history…
Releases
4 entries
No entries match these filters.
- October 20263
- September 20261
Project health
Issue, contributor and maintainer activity in NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra, 2023-10 – 2026-09, as of 2026-09-25. Twelve-month figures first; the trend lines run the whole window.
- Contributors 105 +31 vs prior 12 months
- Maintainers 8 +3 joined · −4 left, last 12 months
- Bus factor 3 committers behind half the commits
- Community-filed 99% of issues opened, last 12 months
- Median time to close 12 days first maintainer reply 25 hours
- Open backlog 1,556 of 6,162 issues ever filed
- Issues opened / month 27 · 0 communitymaintainers
- Open backlog 1,556
- Contributors / month 16
- Commits / month 103
- Stars 77,061
- bugs 8%
- features 58%
- questions 1%
- other 33%
Counts from the project's public repository and git history; no individuals are identified. Maintainers are the committers covering 80% of the last year's commits. how we measure this
Articles
1 article · updated Nov 4, 2026Where ghidra turns up in what others publish: how-tos, attack reports that name it, and incident write-ups. A row says why it is here and quotes where the article names it; the link goes to the publisher.
Breach post-mortems & incident response 1
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Impersonation, Click Hijacking, and TDS: Inside a Malware Distribution Ecosystem
What makes this campaign especially notable is the choice of brands: a high-risk subset of sites impersonates trusted reverse-engineering tools such as Ghidra and dnSpy, used by security researchers and malware analysts.
2 more quotes
…portals” appeared surprisingly high in search results: Figure 3 – Fake Ghidra project website in Google search results What these sites have in common is a shared staging component: their pages load CloudFront-hosted…
…investigated a large-scale operation that impersonates open-source and freeware projects to capture search traffic, including lookalikes for researcher and security tooling such as Ghidra, dnSpy, and SpiderFoot.
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