Broken navigation with nested anonymous structures

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
52/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
cpp
Domain
reverse-engineering

Research direction

Start by reproducing the nested anonymous-structure and union examples in the types view, then inspect the HLIL/MLIL tokens and their typeNames as described. Trace how double-click navigation resolves those tokens, including data variables, and consider the issue done when inner fields navigate to their definitions.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Version and Platform (required):

  • Binary Ninja Version: 6.1.10668-dev
  • Edition: Ultimate
  • OS: macOS
  • OS Version: 27.0
  • CPU Architecture: M5

Bug Description:
Trying to navigate to a field nested in one or more anonymous structures fails to navigate.

Steps To Reproduce:

Structure:
struct foo {
    int pad;
    struct {
        int bar;
    } inner;
};

Code (x86 Windows):
int32_t sub_0(struct foo* arg1)
mov     eax, dword [esp+0x4]
mov     eax, dword [eax+0x4]
retn

HLIL:
return arg1->inner.bar

Trying to double click bar fails to navigate to the field. Looking at the token itself:

>>> current_il_instruction.tokens[-1].typeNames
['bar']

The token doesn't have valid type information for figuring out how to navigate to it.

Making it a union instead:

union foo_u
{
    struct
    {
        int32_t a;
        int32_t b;
    } bar;
};

Function type:
int32_t sub_0(union foo_u* arg1)

HLIL (broken):
return arg1->bar.__offset(0x4).d

MLIL:
eax = eax_1->bar.b

Double clicking b in MLIL also fails to navigate. The token for this:

>>> current_il_instruction.tokens[-1].typeNames
['foo_u', 'bar', 'b']

These two types also fail to navigate when made into data variables.

Expected Behavior:
Double clicking the inner field of these structures should navigate to that field in the types view.

Dominant language
C++
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