idax

Safe, idiomatic Rust bindings for the IDA Pro SDK via the idax C++ wrapper library.

idax provides a concept-driven, fully opaque interface to IDA's analysis engine. All unsafe FFI is encapsulated — users of this crate never write unsafe code. Types that hold SDK resources implement Drop for automatic cleanup.

Prerequisites

• IDA Pro with the IDA SDK (set the IDASDK environment variable to point to your SDK root)
• idax C++ library — build the idax project with CMake first to produce libidax.a
• Rust 2024 edition (nightly or stable 1.85+)

Installation

[dependencies]
idax = "0.2"

Quick start

use idax::{database, function, segment};

fn main() -> idax::Result<()> {
    // Initialize the IDA library
    database::init()?;

    // Open a binary for analysis
    database::open("/path/to/binary", true)?;

    // Query metadata
    let path = database::input_file_path()?;
    let md5 = database::input_md5()?;
    println!("Analyzing: {path} (MD5: {md5})");

    // Iterate functions
    let count = function::count()?;
    for i in 0..count {
        let func = function::by_index(i)?;
        println!("  {:#x}: {}", func.start, func.name);
    }

    // Iterate segments
    let seg_count = segment::count()?;
    for i in 0..seg_count {
        let seg = segment::by_index(i)?;
        println!("  {}: {:#x}..{:#x}", seg.name, seg.start, seg.end);
    }

    database::close(false)?;
    Ok(())
}

Module overview

The crate is organized into modules that mirror the C++ ida:: namespace hierarchy. Every module covers a distinct analysis domain:

Core

Analysis objects

Type system

Advanced

Extension points

Error handling

All fallible operations return idax::Result<T> (alias for std::result::Result<T, idax::Error>) or idax::Status (alias for Result<()>). The Error type carries:

• category — ErrorCategory enum: Validation, NotFound, Conflict, Unsupported, SdkFailure, Internal
• code — numeric error code (0 when unspecified)
• message — human-readable description
• context — additional context (e.g. which SDK function failed)

use idax::{function, Error};
use idax::error::ErrorCategory;

match function::at(0xDEAD) {
    Ok(func) => println!("Found: {}", func.name),
    Err(e) if e.category == ErrorCategory::NotFound => {
        println!("No function at that address");
    }
    Err(e) => return Err(e),
}

RAII / Drop

Types that hold SDK resources implement Drop for automatic cleanup:

Architecture

  Your Rust code
       |
  [ idax ]          safe, idiomatic Rust API
       |
  [ idax-sys ]      raw extern "C" FFI bindings (generated by bindgen)
       |
  [ C shim ]        idax_shim.h / idax_shim.cpp (thin C bridge)
       |
  [ libidax.a ]     idax C++ wrapper library
       |
  [ IDA SDK ]       ida.dylib / ida.so / ida.dll

License

MIT