AMIE

A Minimalist Instruction Extender

AMIE is a Python rework of FRIEND that focuses solely on the ARM architecture (only AArch32 and AArch64 are supported). It is both lightweight and dependency-free, and provides the most relevant and up-to-date information about the ARM system registers and instructions.

Features

Improved processor modules

For MCR/MRC and MCRR/MRCC instructions on AArch32, and for MSR/MRS and SYS instructions on AArch64, the system register encoding is detected and replaced by its user-friendly name in the IDA View subview.

For MCR/MRC and MSR/MRS instructions, it also applies to the Pseudocode subview.

Hints for instructions and registers

Hovering over a system register in the IDA View subview or in the Pseudocode subview will display a summary (usually kept under 30 lines) of the relevant documentation page, including the bitfield when available.

Hovering over an instruction mnemonic in the IDA View subview or in the Pseudocode subview will also display a summary of the relevant documentation page, and the relevant assembly template when available.

Auto-generated resource files

The biggest difference with FRIEND is that the resource files (aarch32.json and aarch64.json) are auto-generated from the Exploration Tools. The system registers and instructions (documentation and encodings) are extracted by a home-made script that parses the ARM-provided XML files.

Installation

Copy the plugin file amie.py, and its resource files aarch32.json and aarch64.json to your plugins directory or your user plugins directory (if you want to share it between multiple IDA Pro versions). These are the default paths:

Dependencies

There are no dependencies! :-)

Improvements

Support for implementation-defined system registers is not available yet.

There is no Hex-Rays support for MCRR/MRRC as this is an IDA Pro limitation.

Credits

• alexhude for creating the FRIEND plugin;
• gdelugre for creating the ida-arm-system-highlight script;
• The good folks at ARM for releasing the Exploration Tools;
• patateqbool and 0xpanda for testing the plugin and reporting bugs;
• Quarkslab for allowing this release.