piotr 1.0.2

Piotr is an instrumentation tool for qemu-system-arm able to emulate ARM-based embedded devices.

System dependencies

$ apt install qemu-system-arm

Introduction to Piotr

Piotr is an emulation helper for Qemu that provides a convenient way to create, share and run virtual IoT devices. It only supports the ARM Architecture at the moment.

Piotr is heavily inspired from @therealsaumil’s ARM-X framework and keeps the same approach: emulated devices run inside an emulated host that provides all the tools you may need and creates a fake environment for them. This approach allows remote debugging with gdbserver or fridaserver, provides a steady platform for vulnerability research, exploitation and training.

Moreover, Piotr is able to package any emulated device into a single file that may be shared and imported by other users, thus sharing its kernel, DTB file or even its host filesystem. This way, it is possible to create new emulated devices based upon existing ones, and to improve all of them by simply changing a single file (kernel, host filesystem, etc.).

How does Piotr work ?

Piotr stores everything it needs inside a specific user directory called .piotr, located in the user’s home directory. This directory stores all the kernels, dtb files, host filesystems and emulated devices.

Each emulated device is stored in a specific subdirectory of your .piotr/devices directory, and must contain at least:

• a config.yaml file containing the device’s qemu configuration in a readable way

• a root filesystem with correct permissions and groups and users

When Piotr is asked to emulate a specific device, it loads its config.yaml file, parses it and creates a Qemu emulated device with the corresponding specifications.

This emulated device can then be driven by Piotr’s helper tools in order to:

• list or kill running processes

• dynamically configure network interfaces

• debug any process running on the emulated device

• …

Documentation

Piotr complete documentation is available at https://piotr.readthedocs.io/en/latest/. If you want to start using Piotr as soon as possible, we recommend you to read our Quickstart guide !

License

Piotr is released under the MIT license, see LICENSE for more information.