Why are Strings with meaning but no usage in decompiled EXE?

Question

I'm RE an executable file of a game with Ghidra, and I searched for strings. I found a lot of strings in the .rdata section, which have a readable meaning, but if I look for "references to this address", there are no results. Why are they included in the binary, if there is no usage for them? Could it be, that they are used at runtime? Here is a picture, for deeper understanding:

I found a lot of strings like this. I know the game very well, and strings like this I never saw ingame.

If someone with 1500 rep could create the `ghidra` tag and then retag this question, that would be nice. — Ross Jacobs, Sep 25 '19 at 20:19
they must be placeholders for the clickable buttons (if you have any)? — R4444, Sep 28 '19 at 00:49

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 08 '22 at 16:29

That looks like an array of strings to me (with each string being 16 characters long, hence the null bytes). If it is, you will likely find references to the beginning of the array where the program will add a dynamic offset to it at runtime which Ghidra can't detect.

Why are Strings with meaning but no usage in decompiled EXE?

1 Answers1