Introduction to Hex-Rays decompilation internals

This technical guide explains Hex-Rays’ microcode and CTree architecture and demonstrates practical techniques for traversing and modifying them in IDA Pro via Python. It provides code examples for walking microcode and CTree nodes, then applies these concepts to a malware-analysis workflow by automating the annotation of a custom import table (using a BLISTER sample) with ctree_visitor_t to rename variables based on resolved API hashes, streamlining reverse engineering tasks.