Styx Emulator Public Release

Summary

This has been a long time in the making. Today we’re announcing the public release of the Styx Emulator!What is Styx?Styx is designed to be a foundational tool for building custom emulators with a focus on security research and debug tooling for DSPs, weird SoCs and embedded systems. We hope you find it as useful as we do for emulation tasks, and that it allows you to focus on target specifics rather than the underlying emulation mechanics.So far we’ve found Styx to be usable in our daily emulation workflows and be a large improvement for the status quo (a la QEMU/PANDA + UNICORN/QILING etc.) specifically when debugging embedded systems and other targets that fit in the “non linux usermode” category.Some features we’re proud of:Built-in bug finding tools (libAFL, memory error detection plugins)Built-in gdbserver with monitor commandsHigh performance, tunable cross-emulator tracebusProgrammatic I/O Access and ManipulationLibrary-first to provide first-class tailoring support(fledgling) Ghidra interopStyx is attempting to fill the gap in current emulation tools where nothing quite fits all the common needs of debugging embedded systems. In particular, Styx has two features that set it apart from all other emulation frameworks out there:letting users choose from multiple instruction execution backendsletting users declaratively or programmatically connect multiple processors and peripherals togetherIn short: Styx comes bundled with fuzzing support, plugins, external tool integrations and multi-processor capabilities in order to bring modern tools to long forgotten architectures and targets.Who should use Styx?Note that the amount of targets and peripherals currently supported in Styx is not large, but it is growing. In general our “should you bother using Styx” guidance we give people is:When to use Styx:Your target isn’t supported by QEMU, it will be significantly easier to add support to StyxYou need harvard memory emulationYou’re developing an embedded system you’re...