Has anyone with IDA Pro had luck with mcsema (or anything similar)?
The idea of taking arbitrary x86/amd64 binaries and converting them to LLVM IR is a concept that fascinates me and I've always been curious what the optimization paths would be -- if you took a go binary output, converted it to LLVM IR, and then compiled with an optimizing LLVM pass how does the result compare, for instance.
McSema developer here. We have a few success stories with it, including lifting, instrumenting, and recompiling Apache web server. It has also been used for symbolic execution of various programs. We at Trail of Bits are working on version 2 of McSema (currently in the use_remill_semantics branch) and we hope to have that released in the coming months.
The idea of taking arbitrary x86/amd64 binaries and converting them to LLVM IR is a concept that fascinates me and I've always been curious what the optimization paths would be -- if you took a go binary output, converted it to LLVM IR, and then compiled with an optimizing LLVM pass how does the result compare, for instance.