IDA licensing has undergone significant changes, as licenses are now platform-agnostic, allowing them to be used across Windows, Linux, and macOS. Various decompiler packs are available, including the new IDA Home RISCV, which replaces the retired IDA Home 68K.
IDA Teams and private Lumina functionality are now optional features that can be used with standard IDA Pro. The concurrent usage of IDA Teams is no longer limited by seat count but by the license type.
In addition, the FlexNet licensing server for floating licenses has been replaced by a brand new custom Hex-Rays licensing server.
IDAlib offers headless processing capabilities for both C++ and Python APIs, enabling standalone applications to leverage IDA’s engine without requiring it to be loaded within IDA.
This facilitates easier development with auto-completion and debugging in preferred IDEs and eliminates the need for RPC or IPC, resulting in native execution speed, and also supports various Python distributions, including CPython, Anaconda, and Homebrew.
New decompilers and disassemblers for RISC-V and Web Assembly (WASM) have been introduced, addressing the growing demand for analyzing modern code formats.
The MIPS disassembler and decompiler now support nanoMIPS instructions, a brand new encoding of the MIPS ISA with new instructions and a different calling convention. The decompiler (HEXMIPS) includes nanoMIPS support without needing an extra license.
Firmware compiled for nanoMIPS often ships in md1rom format, which IDA can now load, parse, and apply debug symbols. The decompiler can now emit try/catch blocks for C++ exceptions in x64 Microsoft VC++ binaries.
IDAPython improvements include type annotations, Python virtual environment support, zero-initialized objects, read-only IDA installation compatibility, and enhanced auto-completion in the CLI and method call hints.
IDA 9.0 introduces significant updates, including the unification of 32-bit and 64-bit support into a single binary, a streamlined API for plugin maintainers, and improved UI features like a multi-line function prototype editor and enhanced structure and enum management.
According to Hex Rays, expanded and updated to include modern languages and compilers, the FLIRT signature database has been updated to include these.
IDA Pro 2024.0 introduces new processor modules, file format support, and various bug fixes. RISC-V gets major updates, including decompiler support, legacy instruction handling, and custom instruction recognition.
Web Assembly (WASM) is now a supported file format. User interface improvements include syntax highlighting for user-defined types, an option to retain structure size, and a new set of keyboard shortcuts.
Decompiler sees improvements in exception handling, constant representation, and function inlining analysis. The SDK gains functionalities for plugin and loader development, process communication, and graph algorithms.