Diasassembly struct breakpoints

[yuiozank]

Hello,

Could someone clarify the recommended workflow for setting breakpoints on structure members in the disassembly view?

What I would like to do is set a hardware read/write breakpoint on a specific structure field. However, when I place the cursor on a member and set the breakpoint, IDA uses the base address of the structure rather than the address of the selected member.

The only workaround I’ve found is to manually edit the breakpoint address. That does work, but the breakpoint is not shown in the disassembly view, which makes the workflow feel somewhat awkward and disconnected.

Is there a cleaner way to do this, or is this simply a limitation of how structures are represented in the disassembly view?

For context, I previously made a post about some of the difficulties interacting with structures in the disassembly view:

Unintuitive struct handling

Hi again, Sorry for posting once more — I promise this is my last suggestion. I’d like to propose an improvement related to how IDA handles structs in the disassembly view. Currently, when a struct is declared in memory, all references within that struct’s memory range are shown as pointing to the first member. For example, if I have [rbx+0x30] referencing a member at offset 0x30, I would expect to be able to jump directly to that offset and inspect it. Instead, IDA jumps to the first struct …

Thanks in advance.

[teresa_hexrays]

Hi,

At the moment, there is no better workaround available through the IDA GUI.

However, it can be implemented with a plugin. One of my colleagues put together an example that adds a hotkey for setting a breakpoint at the exact address - if that sounds useful and you’d like to try it, let me know and I’ll share it with you.