Sem86: a full-system x86 emulator without hardcoded semantics
14 points by classichasclass
14 points by classichasclass
Is this x86 as in 32-bit x86 only? It wasn't super clear, I'd expect something from 2026 to be x86-64 but the fact the newest OS they run is Windows 7...
It's always interesting to see who funds the work:
This paper is based upon work supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific (NIWC Pacific) under Prime Contract No. N66001-21-C-4028, and by DARPA under Prime Contract No. HR001124C0492
A lot of CS research is funded by DARPA. It's really common to see this exact paragraph, even in more theoretical research.
This DARPA contract number is for the E-BOSS program, which is basically about making more expansive kinds of SBOMs.
Yeah. I worked on DARPA contracts for things like “is this Git repo well-formed” to “what sorts of transformations can you do to FSMs that are homomorphic under input transformations”
It’s quite the gamut.
This is just for one of the three authors, looks like standard boilerplate for whatever someone touches. The other two researchers work for the Open University in the Netherlands.
From the liblisa site itself there is some info you seem to have missed:
It produces machine-readable, CPU-specific x86-64 instruction semantics.
They have NLnet funding to continue this work ...