ppc2cpp

PowerPC binary reverse engineering library and tool. The current functionality revolves around checking for program and function equivalence

Requirements

• protobuf
  • Debian: sudo apt install -y protobuf-compiler libprotobuf-dev libz-dev If you only care about using, there are cross platform builds in the GitHub releases

Building

cmake -B build
cmake --build build -j

Usage

ppc2cpp operates on "project files" created by pp2cpp create. If symbol and relocation information are available, that project file can then be used by the rest of the tools.

Tools

ppc2cpp --help can be run to get the list of verbs. ppc2cpp <verb> -- help offers instructions for that verb specifically.

ppc2cpp create

Create a ppc2cpp project from a series of ELF or RVL (DOL and REL) format binary files.

Example:

$ ppc2cpp create -o myProject.ppc2cpp myBinary.o

ppc2cpp viz

Visualize a function's data flow graph. This tool creates a graphviz file that can be rendered to an image using a tool like neato.

Example:

$ ppc2cpp viz -i myProject.ppc2cpp -o graph.dot

ppc2cpp checkflow

Compare the equivalence between the version of a function in two ppc2cpp projects using their data flow graph. This ignores regalloc, scheduling and certain dead code. Returns exit code 0 on equivalence, non zero otherwise

Example:

$ ppc2cpp checkflow project1.ppc2cpp project2.ppc2cpp function1 function2 ...

ppc2cpp importppcdis

Import symbol and relocation information from ppcdis. This is useful if any of the binaries passed to ppc2cpp create did not contain symbol information.

Each -p flag indicates a triplet of ppcdis files: the binary descriptor YAML, label pickle file and relocation pickle file. Example:

$ ppc2cpp importppcdis -s symbols.yml -i myProject.ppc2cpp -p ppcdis_dir/dol.yaml ppcdis_dir/dol_labels.pickle ppcdis_dir/dol_relocs.pickle -p ppcdis_dir/rel.yaml ppcdis_dir/rel_labels.pickle ppcdis_dir/rel_relocs.pickle

ppc2pp compare (experimental)

Compare two ppc2cpp programs. This takes a symbol and reference based approach, which allows symbols to be rearranged arbitrarily. This requires symbol name, type and size information, as well as relocations.

Example:

$ ppc2cpp checkflow project1.ppc2cpp project2.ppc2cpp