Ilfak Guilfanov
More info
- Created
- IDA (1991), Hex-Rays Decompiler (2007)
- Company
- Hex-Rays (Liège)
The man behind IDA, the disassembler that for thirty years was the first thing an analyst opened.
IDA — the Interactive Disassembler — appeared in 1991 and stood apart by letting the user rename functions, correct the analysis and build up an understanding of a program piece by piece. For reverse engineering malware and hunting bugs on x86 it became the default tool, with a price tag that made pirated copies a running joke of the trade.
Guilfanov's Belgian company Hex-Rays added a decompiler in 2007 that turns machine code into readable C-like output, and took over IDA outright in 2008. Around New Year 2005–2006 he shipped an unofficial patch for the Windows WMF vulnerability days before Microsoft managed to. Only when the NSA gave away Ghidra in 2019 did IDA face a free rival worth the name.