Binary Ninja Blog

State of the Ninja: Episode 8

EDIT 2017-09-22: Added more detail to the pricing charts to differentiate between Named and Computer licenses

EDIT 2017-09-26: Fix incorrect year on purchase period for license extension

Many of you are probably aware that our mailing list posts take the form of State of the Ninja emails. We don’t post to the list frequently though, generally reserving it for situations with big announcements.

That said, we’d like to put some more regular updates with what we’re up to available so we’ll be posting those here on the blog. Look for an update in the middle of each month describing the current State of the Ninja. We’ll be offsetting that with a more technical deep dive into a particular component or feature of Binary Ninja at the beginning of each month in our own tick tock schedule.

v1.1

First up, the big news this past month was the release of v1.1!

There’s too many important features added since our launch, but you can see our most recent list post for some of our favorites.

Renewals

We’ve been getting a lot of questions about the renewal process now that we’re one year out from launch and while we’ve had information in various places, here’s a quick summary with all the details in one place.

First, pricing. Our introductory pricing is ending at the end of this month so all renewals will be 50% of our standard prices which begin Oct 1. Those new prices:

Named License New Purchase Renewal
Non-commercial/Student $149 $74
Commercial $599 $299
Computer License New Purchase Renewal
Non-commercial/Student $224 $112
Commercial $899 $449
Headless $374 $187

An upcoming blog post will talk more about the differences in license options, though more information is on the purchase page.

Second, schedule. Here’s some upcoming important dates to keep in mind:

Date Milestone Status
2017-08-31 v1.1 Launched! ☑
2017-09-30 Introductory Pricing Ends ☑
2017-10-01 Initial Renewal Emails Go Out ☐
2017-11-01 First purchases (any purchase before Nov 1, 2016) support ends ☐

What if you miss your renewal period? No worries! We’re extending a grace period of at least one month (or more at our discretion) beyond the end of a license during which renewal pricing is still available. Note that renewing will extend your previous support license a year from its original end date. This gives you access to support, our upcoming current support-only slack channel, and of course live updates on both our dev and stable branches.

In the Code

Here’s a quick summary of changes commited since the 1.1 release:

  • Fixed several Mach-O loader bugs
  • Added lifting for the PPC trap instruction
  • Fixed some ARM/Thumb bugs for functions that start in ARM and transition to thumb
  • Several data flow fixes and optimizations in the lifting and range analysis – this will be most immediately visible in the increased jump table accuracy
  • Linear sweep improvements, most noticable in ARM and PPC as we are testing heavily there, but applicable to all platforms
  • Floating Point IL support – not in the public dev channel yet, but internal testing and development on floating point IL support is underway. Look for an early release on MIPS and other architectures with more unusual features (I’m looking at you, x87 FPU stack) to follow

As always, any customers with a valid support license can follow along with our dev builds by switching update channels via a preferences option

In the News

Here’s some of the more recent sightings of Binary Ninja in presentations, writeups, and other media:

  • Watch Mark Barnes from MWR demonstrate gaining root access to the amazon echo, and see if you can catch the Binary Ninja sticker
  • NCC Group releasd multiple plugins aimed at making Binary Ninja even easier for beginning users
  • Thankfully, Vector 35 survived hurricane IRMA just fine, though our build servers did have to move to a new “server closet”!

Upcoming

Dates Event
2017-10-26 Jordan is speaking at BSides Raleigh and running a free RE workshop
2017-10-09 - 2017-10-10 We’re running our first (and probably only for the year) public PwnAdventure 3 training class