A high-performance Windows process emulator that operates at syscall level, providing full control over process execution through comprehensive hooking capabilities.
Perfect for security research, malware analysis, and DRM research where fine-grained control over process execution is required.
Built in C++ and powered by the Unicorn Engine (or the icicle-emu 🆕).
- 🔄 Syscall-Level Emulation
- Instead of reimplementing Windows APIs, the emulator operates at the syscall level, allowing it to leverage existing system DLLs
- 📝 Advanced Memory Management
- Supports Windows-specific memory types including reserved, committed, built on top of Unicorn's memory management
- 📦 Complete PE Loading
- Handles executable and DLL loading with proper memory mapping, relocations, and TLS
- ⚡ Exception Handling
- Implements Windows structured exception handling (SEH) with proper exception dispatcher and unwinding support
- 🧵 Threading Support
- Provides a scheduled (round-robin) threading model
- 💾 State Management
- Supports both full state serialization and
fast in-memory snapshots(currently broken 😕)
- Supports both full state serialization and
- 💻 Debugging Interface
- Implements GDB serial protocol for integration with common debugging tools (IDA Pro, GDB, LLDB, VS Code, ...)
Note
The project is still in a very early, prototypical state. The code still needs a lot of cleanup and many features and syscalls need to be implemented. However, constant progress is being made :)
Click here for the slides.
Tip
Checkout the Wiki for more details on how to build & run the emulator on Windows, Linux, macOS, ...
1. Checkout the code:
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/momo5502/emulator.git2. Run the following command in an x64 Development Command Prompt in the cloned directory:
cmake --preset=vs20223. Build the solution that was generated at build/vs2022/emulator.sln
4. Create a registry dump by running the grab-registry.bat as administrator and place it in the artifacts folder next to the analyzer.exe
5. Run the program of your choice:
analyzer.exe C:\example.exe