The NSA Makes Ghidra, a Powerful Cybersecurity Tool, Open Source

And while NSA cybersecurity advisor Rob Joyce called the tool a "contribution to the nation’s cybersecurity community" in announcing it at RSA, it will no doubt be used far beyond the United States.You can't use Ghidra to hack devices; it's instead a reverse engineering platform used to take "compiled," deployed software and "decompile" it. (Like other open source code, though, expect it to have some bugs.) Joyce also noted that the NSA views the release of Ghidra as a sort of recruiting strategy, making it easier for new hires to enter the NSA at a higher level, or for cleared contractors to lend their expertise without needing to first come up to speed on the tool.The NSA announced Joyce’s RSA talk, and Ghidra’s imminent release, in early January. “There’s really no downside” to releasing Ghidra.No matter what comes next for the NSA's powerful reversing tool, Joyce emphasized on Tuesday that it is an earnest contribution to the community of cybersecurity defenders—and that conspiracy theorists can rest easy.