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Qiling's usecase, blog and related work

Qiling is an advanced binary emulation framework, with the following features:

Emulate multi-platforms: Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android, BSD, UEFI, DOS, MBR, Ethereum Virtual Machine
Emulate multi-architectures: 8086, X86, X86_64, ARM, ARM64, MIPS, RISCV, PowerPC
Support multiple file formats: PE, MachO, ELF, COM, MBR
Support Windows Driver (.sys), Linux Kernel Module (.ko) & MacOS Kernel (.kext) via Demigod
Emulates & sandbox code in an isolated environment
Provides a fully configurable sandbox
Provides in-depth memory, register, OS level and filesystem level API
Fine-grain instrumentation: allows hooks at various levels (instruction/basic-block/memory-access/exception/syscall/IO/etc)
Provides virtual machine level API such as save and restore current execution state
Supports cross architecture and platform debugging capabilities
Built-in debugger with reverse debugging capability
Allows dynamic hotpatch on-the-fly running code, including the loaded library
True framework in Python, making it easy to build customized security analysis tools on top

Qiling also made its way to various international conferences.

2022:

2021:

2020:

2019:

Qiling is backed by Unicorn engine.

Visit our website https://www.qiling.io for more information.

License

This project is released and distributed under free software license GPLv2 and later version.

Qiling vs other Emulators

There are many open source emulators, but two projects closest to Qiling are Unicorn & Qemu usermode. This section explains the main differences of Qiling against them.

Qiling vs Unicorn engine

Built on top of Unicorn, but Qiling & Unicorn are two different animals.

Unicorn is just a CPU emulator, so it focuses on emulating CPU instructions, that can understand emulator memory. Beyond that, Unicorn is not aware of higher level concepts, such as dynamic libraries, system calls, I/O handling or executable formats like PE, MachO or ELF. As a result, Unicorn can only emulate raw machine instructions, without Operating System (OS) context
Qiling is designed as a higher level framework, that leverages Unicorn to emulate CPU instructions, but can understand OS: it has executable format loaders (for PE, MachO & ELF at the moment), dynamic linkers (so we can load & relocate shared libraries), syscall & IO handlers. For this reason, Qiling can run executable binary without requiring its native OS

Qiling vs Qemu usermode

Qemu usermode does similar thing to our emulator, that is to emulate whole executable binaries in cross-architecture way. However, Qiling offers some important differences against Qemu usermode.

Qiling is a true analysis framework, that allows you to build your own dynamic analysis tools on top (in friendly Python language). Meanwhile, Qemu is just a tool, not a framework
Qiling can perform dynamic instrumentation, and can even hotpatch code at runtime. Qemu does not do either
Not only working cross-architecture, Qiling is also cross-platform, so for example you can run Linux ELF file on top of Windows. In contrast, Qemu usermode only run binary of the same OS, such as Linux ELF on Linux, due to the way it forwards syscall from emulated code to native OS
Qiling supports more platforms, including Windows, MacOS, Linux & BSD. Qemu usermode can only handle Linux & BSD

Installation

Please see setup guide file for how to install Qiling Framework.

Examples

The example below shows how to use Qiling framework in the most striaghtforward way to emulate a Windows executable.

from qiling import Qiling

if __name__ == "__main__":
    # initialize Qiling instance, specifying the executable to emulate and the emulated system root.
    # note that the current working directory is assumed to be Qiling home
    ql = Qiling([r'examples/rootfs/x86_windows/bin/x86_hello.exe'], r'examples/rootfs/x86_windows')

    # start emulation
    ql.run()

The following example shows how a Windows crackme may be patched dynamically to make it always display the "Congratulation" dialog.

from qiling import Qiling

def force_call_dialog_func(ql: Qiling):
    # get DialogFunc address from current stack frame
    lpDialogFunc = ql.stack_read(-8)

    # setup stack memory for DialogFunc
    ql.stack_push(0)
    ql.stack_push(1001)     # IDS_APPNAME
    ql.stack_push(0x111)    # WM_COMMAND
    ql.stack_push(0)

    # push return address
    ql.stack_push(0x0401018)

    # resume emulation from DialogFunc address
    ql.arch.regs.eip = lpDialogFunc


if __name__ == "__main__":
    # initialize Qiling instance
    ql = Qiling([r'rootfs/x86_windows/bin/Easy_CrackMe.exe'], r'rootfs/x86_windows')

    # NOP out some code
    ql.patch(0x004010B5, b'\x90\x90')
    ql.patch(0x004010CD, b'\x90\x90')
    ql.patch(0x0040110B, b'\x90\x90')
    ql.patch(0x00401112, b'\x90\x90')

    # hook at an address with a callback
    ql.hook_address(force_call_dialog_func, 0x00401016)
    ql.run()

The below Youtube video shows how the above example works.

Emulating ARM router firmware on Ubuntu X64 machine

Qiling Framework hot-patch and emulates ARM router's /usr/bin/httpd on a X86_64Bit Ubuntu

Qiling's IDAPro Plugin: Instrument and Decrypt Mirai's Secret

This video demonstrate how Qiling's IDAPro plugin able to make IDApro run with Qiling instrumentation engine

GDBserver with IDAPro demo

Solving a simple CTF challenge with Qiling Framework and IDAPro

Emulating MBR

Qiling Framework emulates MBR

Qltool

Qiling also provides a friendly tool named qltool to quickly emulate shellcode & executable binaries.

With qltool, easy execution can be performed:

With shellcode:

$ ./qltool code --os linux --arch arm --format hex -f examples/shellcodes/linarm32_tcp_reverse_shell.hex

With binary file:

$ ./qltool run -f examples/rootfs/x8664_linux/bin/x8664_hello --rootfs  examples/rootfs/x8664_linux/

With binary and GDB debugger enable:

$ ./qltool run -f examples/rootfs/x8664_linux/bin/x8664_hello --gdb 127.0.0.1:9999 --rootfs examples/rootfs/x8664_linux

With code coverage collection (UEFI only for now):

$ ./qltool run -f examples/rootfs/x8664_efi/bin/TcgPlatformSetupPolicy --rootfs examples/rootfs/x8664_efi --coverage-format drcov --coverage-file TcgPlatformSetupPolicy.cov

With json output (Windows mainly):

$ ./qltool run -f examples/rootfs/x86_windows/bin/x86_hello.exe --rootfs  examples/rootfs/x86_windows/ --console False --json

Contact

Get the latest info from our website https://www.qiling.io

Core developers, Key Contributors and etc

Please refer to CREDITS.md