Question: How to analyze a big file using ghidra_bridge, without a timeout exception?

[TylerKann]

In ghidra_bridge I tried the following commands:

import ghidra_bridge b = ghidra_bridge.GhidraBridge(namespace=globals()) analyze(currentProgram)
Although this does start the analysis, I get a timeout before it completes it (its a big file). Is there any way I can do analysis remotely without a timeout?

Thanks!

[justfoxing]

So, you've got two options (now).

Either you can create your bridge with a specific response_timeout value in seconds (e.g., b = ghidra_bridge.GhidraBridge(namespace=globals(), response_timeout=<value>)) to control the timeout for every command in the script, or you can use remote_eval with the timeout_override argument to just affect the one command (e.g., b.bridge.remote_eval("analyze(currentProgram)", timeout_override=<value>)).

Like you suggest, analyze() can take arbitrarily long based on program size, so I've just added functionality in jfx_bridge version 0.3.3 (the RPC package ghidra_bridge is built on), so you can specify -1 for the response_timeout/timeout_override values. This will disable the timeout and cause the bridge to wait forever until it gets a response.

You'll need to make sure you've updated jfx_bridge in your client environment (you don't need to update the code on the Ghidra side for this to work), so do pip install jfx_bridge --upgrade and make sure you've got version 0.3.3.

As a side note, I noticed analyze() behave a little weirdly as I was testing, just mentioning so it doesn't catch you out: The first call to analyze() will block until analysis is complete as you expect, but if you call it again without saving the changes or closing and re-opening the program, calling analyze() will start the analysis, but return immediately before it finishes. No idea why, #justGhidraThings.

[TylerKann]

Yeah that analyze behavior is quite frustrating

[TylerKann]

Thanks a lot for the -1 update