We are happy to announce that Unicorn Engine was awarded by Alibaba Cloud for its impact on the cybersecurity field (and beyond since our project is widely used for other purposes, too)!

Unicorn Engine was created and released more than 7 years ago to the public. We launched Unicorn Engine under an open-source license with the goal of contributing to the community and helping as many people as possible with our code. Our team has worked hard to maintain and develop the project to its fullest potential. We are pleased to see Unicorn Engine becoming a de facto emulator and laying the foundation for various innovative works in academia and industry.

We want to thank the whole community for your continuous support over the years. This recognition is for all of us!

For further information on the award, see https://asiastar10x10.kr-asia.com/awardees-2022/

Unicorn Engine Team is happy to announce the new version 2.0.1 of our framework!

This version fixes many issues of v2.0 in the core and some bindings. See the ChangeLog for more details.

The source code & precompiled binaries are available in the Download section. See Documentation for how to compile and install Unicorn.

As always, we would like to thank the whole community for your tireless support on developing and maintaining Unicorn project!

We are very happy to announce version 2.0.0 of Unicorn Engine, also known as Unicorn2!

This release is a major step forward for our project. While we still maintain backward compatibility with Unicorn 1.0.x, Unicorn2 supports the updated instruction set of all important CPU architectures, including X86, Arm, Aarch64, Mips, Sparc & M68k. Moreover, we added 4 more architectures in PowerPC, RISCV, S390x & TriCore.

Another significant change on this version is the addition of some new APIs to allow better control on how the core engine works. Check it out the Changelog for more details, and sample codes for how to use these new features.

We would like to thank the whole community for your generous & tireless support for the last 7 years! Without your help, Unicorn would not made this far!

The source code of Unicorn2 is now available on Github. Check out COMPILE.md for how to compile and install it.

Please contact if you want to support our work for the next versions.

We are very excited to announce Unicorn2 beta to the public!

Unicorn engine was first introduced at Blackhat USA 2015 as the only cross-platform-architecture framework for CPU emulation. After its release, Unicorn made some good impact in the security community and quickly established itself as the foundation of various innovative work. More than 6 years passed, it is time to make a major step forward with Unicorn2!

Based on Qemu 5, we built Unicorn2 from scratch, with a lot of optimization on performance & code size. While still maintaining backward compatibility with the current version, Unicorn2 supports the latest instruction set of all important CPU architectures, including X86, Arm, Aarch64, Mips, Sparc & M68k. Going further, we also added 2 highly-demanded architectures in PowerPC & RISCV.

The source code of Unicorn2 is now available at dev branch on our Github repo. Check out COMPILE.md for how to compile and install Unicorn2.

Since this important milestone deserves it, we also designed a new logo for Unicorn, as you can see at the top of this post!

What is next now? Help us to fix bugs, update bindings so we can officially release Unicorn v2.0.

Please contact if you want to support our work.

We are very happy to announce version 1.0.3 of Unicorn Engine!

This version fixes some minor issues of v1.0.2 in the core and some bindings. We also added a new binding in Rust. See the ChangeLog for more details.

The source code & precompiled binaries are available in the Download section. See Documentation for how to compile and install Unicorn.

We also wish to express our sincere gratitude to all contributors, who generously supported us to maintain Unicorn project!

What is next now? Let us look forward to the next major update: Unicorn 2. Please contact if you want to support our work.

We are very happy to announce version 1.0.2 of Unicorn Engine!

It has been more than 3.5 years since the last major update, and this version marks 5 year of Unicorn. Such a long journey for an open source project! That is really exciting to see our magical animal having more and more impact in both academia community and the cybersecurity industry.

This version fixes various issues of v1.0.1, adds some new API and introduces more bindings. See the ChangeLog for more details.

The source code & precompiled binaries are available in the Download section. See Documentation for how to compile and install Unicorn.

In no particular order, we would like to thank CatenaCyber, Grayshift and Google Patch Rewards for sponsoring this release!

We also wish to express our sincere gratitude to all contributors, who generously supported us to maintain Unicorn project!

What is next now? Let us look forward to the next major update: Unicorn 2. Please contact if you want to support our work.

We are excited to announce version 1.0.1 of Unicorn Engine!

The source code & precompiled binaries are available in the download section. See documentation for how to compile and install Unicorn.

A quick tutorial on how to program with Unicorn in C & Python can be found here.

Important changes since v1.0 include:

• Properly handle selected-architecture build.
• Fix compilation issues on PPC & S390x.
• Fix a memory leak on uc_mem_protect().
• ARM:
  • Support big-endian mode.
  • Correct instruction size of Thumb/Thumb2 code.
  • Support read/write APSR register.
• ARM64:
  • Support read/write NEON registers.
  • Support read/write NZCV registers.
• Mips: Support read/write Mips64 registers.
• X86: Support read/write MSR.
• Haskell binding: update to the latest API.
• Python: allow not having PATH setup.

Community also provide independent bindings for Pascal, Rust & Perl.

We are very happy to announce version 1.0 of Unicorn Engine!

The source code & precompiled binaries are available in the download section. See documentation for how to compile and install Unicorn.

A quick tutorial on how to program with Unicorn in C & Python can be found here.

Important changes since v0.9 include:

• Lots of bugfixes in all architectures.
• Fix many memory leaking issues.
• New APIs: uc_query, uc_reg_write_batch, uc_reg_read_batch, uc_mem_map_ptr, uc_mem_regions, uc_free, uc_context_alloc, uc_context_save & uc_context_restore.
• New memory hook type: UC_HOOK_MEM_READ_AFTER.
• Add new version macros UC_VERSION_MAJOR, UC_VERSION_MINOR, UC_VERSION_EXTRA.
• Remove glib & pkconfig dependency.
• Windows: export a static lib that can be used outside of Mingw.
• ARM:
  • Support MCLASS cpu (Cortex-M3).
  • Better support for Thumb mode.
  • uc_reg_write now can modify CPSR register.
  • Add some ARM coproc registers.
• ARM64: uc_reg_read & uc_reg_write now handles W0-W31 registers.
• X86:
  • Fix 16bit address computation.
  • Fix initial state of segment registers.
• Windows: fix a double free bug in uc_close.
• 3 new bindings: Haskell, MSVC, VB6.
• Python:
  • Better support for Python3
  • Fix memory leaking that prevents UC instances from being GC.

Community also provide independent bindings for Pascal, Rust & Perl.

Huge thanks to all the heroic contributors who worked hard for over 1 year to make this release possible!

We are very excited to announce the first public release, version 0.9, of Unicorn Engine!

The source code & precompiled binaries are available in the download section. See documentation for how to compile and install Unicorn.

A quick tutorial on how to program with Unicorn in C & Python can be found here.

We would like show our gratitude to the beta testers for bug reports & code contributions during the beta phase! Their invaluable helps have been tremendous for us to keep this far.

Unicorn aims to lay the ground for innovative works. We look forward to seeing many advanced research & development in the security area built on this engine. Let the fun begin!

We are excited to announce that the beta-test phase of the Unicorn engine has officially kicked off!

The plan is to run this testing phase in few weeks, then if the code is considered good enough, version 1.0 will be released to public immediately.

We are honoured to have following heroes helping out us in this phase (list is in no particular order)

• Nguyen Tan Cong

• Loi Anh Tuan

• Edgar Barbosa

• Joxean Koret

• Chris Eagle

• Jay Little, Trail of Bits

• Jeong Wook Oh

• Luis Miras

• Yan Shoshitaishvili, Shellphish & UC Santa Barbara

• Erik Fischer

• Darel Griffin, NCC Group

• Anton Cherepanov

• Mohamed Saher (halsten)

• Tyler Colgan

• Jonathon Reinhart

• Blue Skeye

• Chris Maixner

• Sergi Alvarez, aka pancake (author of radare)

• Ryan Hileman

• Tim “diff” Strazzere

• WanderingGlitch of the Zero Day Initiative

• Sascha Schirra

• François Serman

• Sean Heelan

• Luke Burnett

• Parker Thompson

• Daniel Godas-Lopez

• Antonio “s4tan” Parata

• Corey Kallenberg

• Shift

• Gabriel Quadros

• Fabian Yamaguchi

• Ralf-Philipp Weinmann

• Mike Guidry

• Joshua “posixninja” Hill

We gave a presentation on Unicorn engine at the BlackHat USA 2015 security conference. The talk went well, and we got nice feedbacks from the audience.

The slides is now available in PDF format. Find in the presentation more details on the design \& implementation of Unicorn.

We would like to improve the code quality before the official release. Therefore, Unicorn project is now calling for beta testers!

• Are you are willing to help to test Unicorn to find \& clean bugs?

• Can you code? You do not need to be an excellent coder, but writing some tools using Unicorn is the only way to find bugs at this phase.

If the answer is “Yes” for both questions, then email us with some self-instroduction on why you are interested, and how you can help.

Unicorn will be released soon with full source code - in GPL license - after this short beta phase.

We are working to release more contents & prepare for our BlackHat USA 2015 talk. Meanwhile, check out a sample code in Python and C language to see how Unicorn can be useful for a real problem.

Our presentation at BlackHat USA will be on August 5th, 10:20 - 11:10, in room “South Seas IJ”.

See you there with some cool Unicorn stickers, soon!

We are happy to launch the website for Unicorn CPU Emulator! Also find here the mailing list and twitter address where we will update information on the project.

• Unicorn now has a mailing list. Subscribe to the list for updated information & do conversation

• Users are also encouraged to follow us on Twitter for important announcements.