SightHouse is an open-source tool developed by Quarkslab that helps reverse engineers automatically identify known functions inside binaries by matching them with previously analyzed code.

SightHouse is a tool designed to assist reverse engineers by retrieving information and metadata from programs and identifying similar functions.

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What Problem Does It Solve?

Reverse engineering modern software is complex due to:

• Large codebases with thousands of functions
• Heavy use of third-party libraries
• Repetitive or AI-generated code patterns

This makes it difficult to distinguish custom logic vs reused components, often wasting time analyzing irrelevant code.

SightHouse tackles this by automating function identification using similarity matching.

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Deployment & Usage

SightHouse is available on Pypi.

# Install SRE clients only
pip install sighthouse-client 
# Install frontend only
pip install sighthouse-frontend
# Install pipeline only 
pip install sighthouse-pipeline
# Or install everything
pip install sighthouse[all]

From sources

You can also install it from the git repository:

# Download the repo
git clone https://github.com/quarkslab/sighthouse && cd sighthouse 
# Make install will create a new virtual env and install sighthouse in it
make install 

How SightHouse Works

SightHouse compares functions from a target binary with a large database of known function signatures. When a match is found:

• The function is identified
• Its original name and source are suggested
• Metadata is added directly inside the reverse engineering tools

It supports integration with:

• IDA Pro
• Ghidra
• Binary Ninja

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Core Technology

SightHouse relies on the Binary Similarity problem, which involves detecting similar functions using:

• Assembly code
• Intermediate representations
• Raw binary patterns

After benchmarking multiple approaches, the tool uses BSIM (from Ghidra) as its core engine because:

• It is scalable
• Works across architectures
• Supports large databases via PostgreSQL/Elasticsearch
• Provides stable performance for production use

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Architecture Overview

SightHouse is built with three main components:

1. SRE Clients (Plugins)
   • Integrated into tools like Ghidra/IDA
   • Sends binaries for analysis
2. Frontend API Server
   • Central system handling requests
   • Runs analysis using Ghidra + BSIM
3. Signature Pipeline
   • Automatically builds and updates the signature database
   • Scrapes projects, compiles them, and extracts function signatures

👉 The diagram on page 3 shows this pipeline workflow, including scrapers, compilers, analyzers, and storage systems working together.

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Check SightHouse