radare2 Reverse Engineering

radare2 is an open-source framework for reverse engineering and binary analysis, providing a complete toolchain for disassembling, debugging, analyzing, and patching binary files. Created by Sergi Alvarez (pancake) in 2006, radare2 has over 20,000 stars as of 2026 and is one of the most widely used reverse engineering tools alongside Ghidra and IDA Pro. Written in C for maximum portability and performance, radare2 runs on over 30 operating systems and architectures. Key features include: multi-architecture disassembly (supporting over 40 CPU architectures including x86, x86-64, ARM, ARM64, MIPS, PowerPC, RISC-V, SPARC, AVR, and WebAssembly), binary format support (parsing over 40 binary formats including ELF, PE, Mach-O, Dex, Java CLASS, ELF core files, ROM images, and firmware), linear and graph disassembly views, debugging (native debugging on local and remote targets via GDB, WinDBG, and Bochs, with support for breakpoints, watchpoints, and step execution), binary diffing (comparing two binary versions to identify code changes via Zignatures), binary patching (modifying binary files directly within radare2), emulation (integrated ESIL emulator for simulating code execution without running the binary), scripting (automation via Python, Ruby, Lua, and JavaScript bindings, plus the built-in r2pipe for inter-process communication), analysis auto-detection (identifying functions, strings, cross-references, and control flow automatically), function signatures (FLIRT-style signature matching for identifying library functions), and r2agent (a web-based interface for remote analysis).