Analysis

Radare2 has a very rich set of commands and configuration options to perform data and code analysis, to extract useful information from a binary, like pointers, string references, basic blocks, opcode data, jump targets, cross references and much more. These operations are handled by the a (analyze) command family:

|Usage: a[abdefFghoprxstc] [...]
| aa[?]              analyze all (fcns + bbs) (aa0 to avoid sub renaming)
| a8 [hexpairs]      analyze bytes
| ab[b] [addr]       analyze block at given address
| abb [len]          analyze N basic blocks in [len] (section.size by default)
| abt [addr]         find paths in the bb function graph from current offset to given address
| ac [cycles]        analyze which op could be executed in [cycles]
| ad[?]              analyze data trampoline (wip)
| ad [from] [to]     analyze data pointers to (from-to)
| ae[?] [expr]       analyze opcode eval expression (see ao)
| af[?]              analyze Functions
| aF                 same as above, but using anal.depth=1
| ag[?] [options]    draw graphs in various formats
| ah[?]              analysis hints (force opcode size, ...)
| ai [addr]          address information (show perms, stack, heap, ...)
| an [name] [@addr]  show/rename/create whatever flag/function is used at addr
| ao[?] [len]        analyze Opcodes (or emulate it)
| aO[?] [len]        Analyze N instructions in M bytes
| ap                 find prelude for current offset
| ar[?]              like 'dr' but for the esil vm. (registers)
| as[?] [num]        analyze syscall using dbg.reg
| av[?] [.]          show vtables
| ax[?]              manage refs/xrefs (see also afx?)

In fact, a namespace is one of the biggest in radare2 tool and allows to control very different parts of the analysis:

• Code flow analysis
• Data references analysis
• Using loaded symbols
• Managing different type of graphs, like CFG and call graph
• Manage variables
• Manage types
• Emulation using ESIL VM
• Opcode introspection
• Objects information, like virtual tables