Upstream contribution · NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra

ghidra · Preserving Android sparse-image bytes in Ghidra

Rudy Celekli’s engineering portfolio · AI-assisted summary

Problem

FILL chunks reversed their four-byte pattern. DONT_CARE chunks left zero bytes out of the checksum, and a skipped region exactly the size of the 1 MiB buffer could produce no output.

Engineering response

The decoder preserves the stored fill order and emits skipped regions in bounded blocks, applying each block to the checksum.

Evidence and scope

The linked case documents the 1 MiB boundary and the validation revision. The contribution discloses Codex implementation and identifies the earlier verification run as historical because it predates source-only cleanup.

• Merged pull request #9805
• Android sparse-image deep dive
• Merged source revision