cemu v0.7 releases: lightweight multi-architecture assembly playground

by do son · Published July 11, 2019 · Updated May 1, 2024

Writing assembly is fun. Assembly is the lowest language (humanly understandable) available to communicate with computers and is crucial to understand the internal mechanisms of any machine. Unfortunately, setting up an environment to write, compile and run assembly for various architectures (x86, ARM, MIPS, SPARC) has always been painful. CEmu is an attempt to fix this by providing a bundled GUI application that empowers users to write assembly and test it by compiling it to bytecode and executing it in a QEMU-based emulator.

Cheap EMUlator combines all the advantages of a basic assembly IDE, compilation, and execution environment, by relying on the great libraries Keystone, Unicorn and Capstone engines in a Qt powered GUI.

It allows to test binary samples, check your shellcodes or even simply learn how to write assembly code, all of this for the following architectures:

x86-32 / x86-64
Arm / AArch64
MIPS / MIPS64
SPARC / SPARC64
(more to come)

CEmu was tested and works on Linux, Windows, and MacOSX.

Changelog v0.7

Moved to PyQt6
Updated minimum Python version to 3.10
Added GitHub Actions for publishing, formatting, and linting
Enforced black as the only coding style
Improved CI/CD
Command-line REPL based on prompt_toolkit
Cemu can now be used as a library
Ctrl+F can be used to switch to focus mode, showing nothing but code pane

Improvements

All plugins and panes are now dockable widgets, which can be hidden/displayed from toolbar
Created a global backend context structure
Refactored code to use the global context
Use of GithubActions for testing, formatting and publishing
Added stale.yml config
Added issue templates
Added PR template
Added contribution and funding policy files
Added an action for codeql-analysis.yml
Updated readme with new logo and badges
Added byte alignment combobox to memory view
Removed debug prints and added docstrings
Added new commands in CLI
Fixed state transition bug in UI
Added Pytest run in CI
Added basic tests for ARM/Aarch64
Removed obsolete files
Started adding support for multiple OSes

Bug Fixes

Implemented type hinting throughout the project, resulting in many potential bug fixed
Implemented a proper callback system for logging
Fixed most errors from pylint
Fixed emulation issues
Mitigated a weird unicorn-engine bug in MIPS and SPARC, reporting an incorrect emulation end address
Fixed state transition bug in the UI

Miscellaneous

Made delivery on demand in CI
Fixed typos in CI actions
Updated build.yml file
Fixed py 3.10 version specification in CI
Restored files to permission 0644
Added warning message when no SP or PC was specified before starting emulation
Updated README.md, added more descriptive how-to, added REPL screenshot, and a fancy new logo
Fixed the calculation of $sp and $pc when the emulator sets up
Added extra tests

Install

From PyPI
This is the recommended way to install cemu as it will work out of the box. You can install cemu on your system or using virtualenv or pipenv, by running:
pip3 install –user –upgrade cemu
From GitHub
git clone https://github.com/hugsy/cemu && cd cemu pip3 install –user –upgrade .

OpenReil integration

`OpenREIL <https://github.com/Cr4sh/openreil>`__ is an Open Source library created by [@Cr4sh](https://twitter.com/@d_olex) that implements a translator and tools for generating Intermediate Language level code (REIL). OpenREIL library can be used optionally with cemu. The Current version of OpenREIL only provides support for x86 (Intel) architecture.

If you use cemu with Python 2.7, you can also use `OpenReil <https://github.com/Cr4sh/openreil>`__ to generate IR code based on the content of the Code panel.

cemu-openreil