Python memory map API is kinda awkward

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#7,359 1 comment 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
python
Domain
api, reverse-engineering

Research direction

Start with the Python MemoryMap API entry point and review how regions, iteration, and flags are currently exposed. Done means the API provides an object or equivalent access for regions, supports iterating all regions, and accepts the flag representation needed to copy flags between regions.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Component: Python API Effort: Low Impact: Low

Version and Platform (required):

  • Binary Ninja Version: 5.2.8236-dev Ultimate, d8af0ff0
  • OS: macos
  • OS Version: 26.0
  • CPU Architecture: arm64

Bug Description:
I used the MemoryMap API for the first time today and found it a bit awkward to use. I was writing a small script to extract the flags for each memory region into a dictionary so they could be used to copy the same flags to an existing database (to help recover from #7354).

I ended up with:

import functools
{ bv.memory_map.get_active_memory_region_at(s.start): 
    functools.reduce(lambda a, b: a | b, bv.memory_map.get_memory_region_flags(bv.memory_map.get_active_memory_region_at(s.start)), 0)
    for s in bv.segments
}

I had expected it to look more like:

{ region.name: region.flags for region in bv.memory_map }

Specifically:

  • There's no object to represent a memory region.

    Looking up a region by address gives you back a name. To query properties of that region you pass the name to functions on MemoryMap.

  • There's no way to iterate all memory regions.

    MemoryMap implements __len__, but not __getitem__ or __iter__.

  • get_memory_region_flags returns a set containing zero or more SegmentFlag, but set_memory_region_flags accepts a SegmentFlag.

    In order to take the flags from one memory region and apply them to another, you have to do something like reduce(lambda a, b: a | b, flags, 0) to convert from the set to SegmentFlag. set_memory_region_flags should probably accept both a set or SegmentFlag.

Dominant language
C++
Stars
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Forks
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Avg merge
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Merged PRs (30d)
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