radare2 does not show reference to memory address

Question

I am debugging Challenge 6 from the 2014 FlareOn challenges. For incorrect imput it displays the "bad" message. Running /i bad returns 0x004f3bf2 hit0_0 "bad". ps @ 0x004f3bf2 returns bad as expected. My problem is that if I try to find reference to this memory address, axt @ 0x004f3bf2, radare2 does not return anything, but the address is surely referenced:

pd 1 @ 0x43710c
0x0043710c      bff23b4f00     movl $0x4f3bf2, %edi        ; "bad" @ 0x4f3bf2

I have written a simple application containig const char* bad="bad"; printf("%s\n", bad);. In this case using the steps from above radare2 correctly identifies the line calling printf.

Answer 1

This is because radare2 doesn't come with analysis by default, moreover, it doesn't have (yet?) great analysis capabilities. The reason why (beside the lack of time/interest/contributors of course) is explained in the previous link.

Also, please note that the string isn't referenced: during the disassembly, radare2 will detect strings and tell you about them, but this doesn't mean that it will add them to its internal database.