idaxex

idaxex is a native loader plugin for IDA Pro, adding support for loading in Xbox360 XEX executables.

Originally started as an IDAPython loader, work was continued as a native DLL to solve the shortcomings of it.

This should hopefully have the same features as xorloser's great Xex Loader (for IDA 6 and older), along with additional support for some early non-XEX2 formats, such as XEX1 used on beta-kits.

Supported formats

Includes support for the following XEX formats:

• XEX2 (>= kernel 1861)
• XEX1 (>= 1838)
• XEX% (>= 1746)
• XEX- (>= 1640)
• XEX? (>= 1529)
• XEX0 (>= 1332)

Features

• Can handle compressed/uncompressed images, and encrypted/decrypted (with support for retail, devkit & pre-release encryption keys)
• Reads in imported functions & libraries into IDA's "imports" window, and also reads exports from the loaded module into the "exports" window.
• Automatically names imports that are well-known, such as imports from the kernel & XAM, just like xorloser's loader would.
• PE sections are created & marked with the appropriate permissions as given by the PE headers.
• Hardware-accelerated AES-NI support which should allow loading encrypted XEXs pretty quickly!

Install

Builds for IDA 7.2-7.5, both 32-bit and 64-bit, are available in the releases section.

To install the loader just extract the contents of the folder for your IDA version (eg. ida75_win) into IDA's install folder (eg. C:\Program Files\IDA 7.5)

I recommend pairing this loader with the PPCAltivec plugin, an updated version for IDA 7 is available at hayleyxyz's repo here: https://github.com/hayleyxyz/PPC-Altivec-IDA

Building

You'll need to copy this repo into your idasdk\ldr\ folder, eg. for me I have it at C:\idasdk\ldr\xex\idaxex.sln

With that done you should be able to just build the solution, ida32 will build a DLL for 32-bit IDA while ida64 will build for 64-bit.

This project is designed for IDA on Windows but maybe it could work on other OS's too, I've tried to make sure not to include any Windows-specific things, so hopefully there's a good chance for it to work. If you try it out please let me know how it goes!

Todo

I've been using this loader for a few months now and it's worked pretty well, but no doubt there's probably bugs to be found in it - if you encounter anything strange please don't hesitate to make a bug report on the issue tracker!

• Right now known-import-names are hardcoded inside the loader, it'd be nice if we can make them external somehow... xorloser's loader seems to read them from Xbox360.xml - maybe we can do something similar?

Credits

idaxex is based on work by the Xenia project, XEX2.bt by Anthony, xextool 0.1 by xor37h, Xex Loader & x360_imports.idc by xorloser, xkelib, and probably many others I forgot to name!

Thanks to everyone involved in the Xbox 360 modding/reverse-engineering community!

xex1tool

Also included is an attempt at recreating xorloser's XexTool, for working with older pre-XEX2 executables. (The name is only to differentiate it from the original XexTool - it'll still support XEX2 files fine)

So far it can print info on the various XEX headers (via -l), and extract the basefile (PE/XUIZ) from inside the XEX.

Support for other XexTool features may slowly be added over time (of course any help is appreciated!)