Qiling is an advanced binary emulation framework, with the following features:
- Cross platform: Windows, MacOS, Linux, BSD, UEFI, DOS
- Cross architecture: X86, X86_64, Arm, Arm64, MIPS, 8086
- Multiple file formats: PE, MachO, ELF, COM, MBR
- Emulates & sandbox machine code in an isolated environment
- Provides a fully configurable sandbox
- Provides in-dept 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 is backed by Unicorn engine.
Visit our website https://www.qiling.io for more information.
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2020:
- Black Hat, USA
- Black Hat, Asia
- Hack In The Box, Lockdown 001
- Hack In The Box, Lockdown 002
- Nullcon
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2019:
- Defcon, USA
- Hitcon
- Zeronights
This project is released and distributed under free software license GPLv2.
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.
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.
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.
Please see setup guide file for how to install Qiling Framework.
- Below example shows how to use Qiling framework to emulate a Windows EXE on a Linux machine.
from qiling import *
# sandbox to emulate the EXE
def my_sandbox(path, rootfs):
# setup Qiling engine
ql = Qiling(path, rootfs)
# now emulate the EXE
ql.run()
if __name__ == "__main__":
# execute Windows EXE under our rootfs
my_sandbox(["examples/rootfs/x86_windows/bin/x86_hello.exe"], "examples/rootfs/x86_windows")- Below example shows how to use Qiling framework to dynamically patch a Windows crackme, make it always display "Congratulation" dialog.
from qiling import *
def force_call_dialog_func(ql):
# get DialogFunc address
lpDialogFunc = ql.unpack32(ql.mem.read(ql.reg.esp - 0x8, 4))
# setup stack memory for DialogFunc
ql.stack_push(0)
ql.stack_push(1001)
ql.stack_push(273)
ql.stack_push(0)
ql.stack_push(0x0401018)
# force EIP to DialogFunc
ql.reg.eip = lpDialogFunc
def my_sandbox(path, rootfs):
ql = Qiling(path, rootfs)
# 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()
if __name__ == "__main__":
my_sandbox(["rootfs/x86_windows/bin/Easy_CrackMe.exe"], "rootfs/x86_windows")The below Youtube video shows how the above example works.
- Solving a simple CTF challenge with Qiling Framework and IDAPro
- More information on fuzzing with Qiling Unicornalf can be found here.
- Qiling Framework hot-patch and emulates ARM router's /usr/bin/httpd on a X86_64Bit Ubuntu
- Qiling Framework emulates UEFI
Qiling also provides a friendly tool named qltool to quickly emulate shellcode & executable binaries.
With qltool, easy execution can be performed:
With shellcode:
$ ./qltool shellcode --os linux --arch arm --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
See https://docs.qiling.io/ for more details
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
Qiling supports remote debugging now.
See https://docs.qiling.io/ for more details
Get the latest info from our website https://www.qiling.io
Contact us at email info@qiling.io, or via Twitter @qiling_io or Weibo
- LAU kaijern (xwings) kj@qiling.io
- NGUYEN Anh Quynh aquynh@gmail.com
- DING tianZe (D1iv3) dddliv3@gmail.com
- SUN bowen (w1tcher) w1tcher.bupt@gmail.com
- CHEN huitao (null) null@qiling.io
- YU tong (sp1ke) spikeinhouse@gmail.com
- Earl Marcus (klks84) klks84@gmail.com
- FOO Kevin (chfl4gs) chbsd64@qiling.io
- lazymio
- kabeor
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- liba2k
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