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Hydra Engine
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About

The project

Hydra Engine is NSA's Ghidra with one module added: a headless session that runs as a long-lived daemon, so several AI agents, MCP servers and scripts can open, read, change and import programs through one JVM at the same time. It is made by RusticStack and contributors, in the open, at RusticStack/hydra-engine.

What is ours, and what is Ghidra

Hydra Engine adds, and maintains:

  • the Ghidra/Features/HeadlessSession module: the daemon, its Python launcher and client, and their tests;
  • a headless-only build (gradle buildHeadless);
  • a few small fixes to Ghidra classes, found by the module's measurements and tests and listed in its README;
  • the repository's own documentation, assets and CI, and this website.

Everything else is Ghidra as its authors publish it. The code keeps Ghidra's names (ghidra.*, Ghidra/Features/..., ghidra_12.3_DEV), so Ghidra scripts and extensions work unchanged. “Hydra Engine” is the name of the project, not of anything inside it.

Following upstream

The main branch is upstream Ghidra master plus the additions above, merged, never rebased, when upstream moves. Only a handful of upstream files are touched, so a sync conflicts in those at most. A release is named after the Ghidra version it is built on and a counter, such as 12.3-hydra.1, and the changelog names the upstream commit of each release. Because master is Ghidra's next version under development, a project saved by this build cannot be opened by Ghidra 12.2 or 12.1.4. A legacy-12.1.4 branch keeps the module on Ghidra 12.1.4 for projects that must stay there.

Licence

Hydra Engine is distributed under the Apache License 2.0, the licence of Ghidra. Ghidra's NOTICE and the third-party licences in its licenses/ and GPL/ directories apply unchanged. What Hydra Engine adds, and the disclaimers below, are in NOTICE-HYDRA. Ghidra's original README is kept in the repository as README-GHIDRA.md.

Names

Hydra Engine is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by the National Security Agency, the United States Government or the Ghidra project; “Ghidra” is used only to say where the code comes from, and the name belongs to its authors.

The Hydra is the many-headed serpent of Greek myth: one body, many heads, and two new ones for every one cut off. Here the body is the daemon and the heads are its clients. The project is not affiliated with Marvel or The Walt Disney Company and uses none of their characters or marks; the serpent in the logo is our own drawing.

Credits

Ghidra is the work of the National Security Agency's Research Directorate and the Ghidra contributors. Hydra Engine would be nothing without it.

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