Ghidra: First Steps in Reverse Engineering

Ghidra is the NSA’s gift to the reversing community. Free, cross-platform, and surprisingly capable.

We load a stripped ELF binary, let the auto-analysis run, and explore the decompiler output. The key insight: Ghidra’s decompiler doesn’t produce compilable C — it produces readable pseudocode. Renaming variables and retyping structs manually is where the real reverse engineering happens.

The biggest beginner mistake is trusting auto-analysis too much. Ghidra gives you a strong first draft, not ground truth. The real work starts when you challenge defaults: unknown function signatures, wrong variable types, and misidentified control flow around indirect calls.

First-session workflow

Run analysis with default options.
Find main (or likely entry flow) and map high-level behavior.
Rename obvious functions by side effects (read_config, decrypt_blob).
Define structs for repeated pointer patterns.
Revisit call sites and fix function signatures incrementally.

Doing this in loops is faster than trying to perfect one function in isolation. Each corrected type makes several other decompiler views clearer.

Practical tip

Keep a small text log while reversing: assumptions, confirmed facts, and open questions. It prevents circular analysis and makes handoff easier when you return days later. Reverse engineering is part technical, part narrative. If the story of the binary is coherent, your findings are usually solid.