IDA Compare Updates

Author: David Zimmer
Date: 03.21.25 - 3:23am

So after like a decade of being out of commission, I finally found some time last weekend to resurrect IDA Compare. It is now included in the IDA_JScript installer with support for IDA 7/8/9.

The exporter UI used to run in the 32bit IDA process. Once IDA was no longer 32 bit..my vb6 UI got hosed. Now the exporter is built into IDA Compare main exe and uses the IDASrvr IPC plugin to do its work. It wasnt actually that much work, I have just been lazy.

The IDASrvr plugin for IDA 9 now adds some Edit/IdaCompare/ menu options that allow you to launch IDA compare directly as well as start the export process from the menu such as Export A, Export B and Export Fname. These options will use the last used database ida compare saved. (no streamline way to set the db from the menu)

The export fname option will allow you to save the compare data to the database into a table with the base file name. So one ida compare database can hold multiple tables now. btw the database engine was now switched to sqllite over access. You will need to manually install the 32bit sqllite drivers

The plugin can also be run from the command line something like:

C:IDA9>ida -A -Oidacompare:export_a bad.exe_

In this scenario ida will disassemble bad.exe_, the plugin will wait for disassembly to be complete, then it will launch ida compare with the /export_a argument. Ida compare will start up, connect to the specified ida hwnd, do the importing, then close down IDA.

In this convoluted way we now have command line based automated exporting. the args it accepts are export_a, export_b, export_fname.

Since IDA Compare was built to diff tables a/b there is now a new table manager that allows you to rename and copy around tables to prep them for diffing. I might streamline this some more but it is what it is for now.

I will port these plugin extras over to the IDA 7/8 plugins soon. IDA JScript and IDA Compare now work seamlessly with IDA 7/8/9.

I will also add in the ability to run ida jscript scripts from the command line when shelling out IDA in automation mode.