idaidle

Copyright 2016-2021 Google LLC

Disclaimer: This is not an official Google product (experimental or otherwise), it is just code that happens to be owned by Google.

What is it?

idaidle is a plugin for the commercial IDA Pro disassembler that warns users if they leave their instance idling for too long. After a predetermined amount of idle time, the plugin first warns and later then saves the current disassemlby database and closes IDA.

This is useful in organizations with IDA Pro floating licenses to make sure that analysts return their license to the license server when they are done using it.

How to Build

Dependencies:

• IDA 7.0 or higher with a matching SDK installed
• Linux/macOS: GCC/Clang with C++11 support
• Windows: Visual Studio 2015 Compiler or later
• CMake 3.7 or higher

First run CMake to configure the build, replacing <IDASDK> with the root path of your IDA SDK installation:

Linux/macOS:

mkdir -p build && cd build
cmake .. -DIdaSdk_ROOT_DIR=<IDASDK> -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release

Windows:

if not exist build mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DIdaSdk_ROOT_DIR=<IDASDK> -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release

Once configured, start the build with:

Linux:

cmake --build .

macOS/Windows:

cmake --build . --config=Release

If all goes well, depending on your configuration, the following plugin files are now in the build directory:

OS	Filename
Linux	idaidle.so
	idaidle64.so
macOS	idaidle.dylib
	idaidle64.dylib
Windows	idaidle.dll
	idaidle64.dll

Note: A 64 in any of the filenames denotes a 64-bit address aware plugin.

Installation

To install system-wide, put the plugin binaries into the plugins folder in your IDA Pro installation. Below are the default paths:

OS	Plugin path
Linux	/opt/ida-7.5/plugins
macOS	/Applications/IDA Pro 7.5/idabin/plugins
Windows	%ProgramFiles(x86)%\IDA 7.5\plugins

Replace 7.0 with your actual version number.

To install just for the current user, copy the files into one of these directories instead:

OS	Plugin path
Linux/macOS	~/.idapro/plugins
Windows	%AppData%\Hex-Rays\IDA Pro\plugins

Usage

As soon as a database is opened, the plugin starts to monitor idle time, i.e. the time between to consecutive UI operations. By default, after six hours, a warning is printed to the output window. After 12 hours, a database snapshot will be created and the IDA Pro instance will be closed without saving. This is so that the plugin does not accidentally overwrite unsaved work or databases the analyst did not want to save.

There is no configuration file, but the following command-line options are available:

Option	Description
-OIdaIdleWarningSeconds:N	Warn the user after N seconds of inactivity
-OIdaIdleTimeoutSeconds:N	Create snapshot and close IDA afer N seconds

Note: IDA only recognizes these command-line options if they come before any filenames.