emulate-code

A virtual-machine tool that runs raw machine-code bytes, such as shellcode, on a simulated x86, x64, ARM or ARM64 processor.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to study shellcode, decoder stubs or isolated machine-code functions from suspicious files or other samples.
Why use it?
It lets you inspect what code computes without executing it on the host computer or allowing normal host system calls. It reports registers, memory changes, instruction count and the reason execution stopped.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/batteryshark/rekit/emulate-code
Any agent
npx skills add batteryshark/rekit --skill emulate-code
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/batteryshark/rekit

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 85 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 545 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00085 $0.00545
Opus 5 $0.00043 $0.00272
Sonnet 5 $0.00017 $0.00109
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00055

Measured 2d ago against content hash b3c526fb0175, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

emulate-code scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 2 executable files (scripts/build.sh, scripts/emulate.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/emulate-code/SKILL.md · 49 lines

What it actually says

Code Emulator (Unicorn)

Emulate a raw code / shellcode blob on a virtual CPU and see what it computes — the contained member of the dynamic tier (the bytes run on Unicorn, not the host).

When to use

You have a chunk of machine code — shellcode carved out of a payload, an obfuscated decoder stub, an isolated function — and you want to know what it does without running it natively. Emulation gives you the register/memory effects safely.

What it does

Maps memory + a stack, writes the blob at a base address, and emulates it (x86/x64/ arm/arm64) with an instruction-count and timeout cap. Reports:

  • final register state,
  • instruction count and stop reason (completed / fault / instruction-limit),
  • memory writes (address ← value).
  • emulator/backend provenance (version, host/process architecture, native/Rosetta, and library digest).

Contained: memory-only, no host syscalls unless explicitly wired. Because it can't touch the host, it is not behind the --allow-dynamic gate (unlike exec-observe and the tracer skills, which run the target natively).

Usage

rekit run emulate-code ./shellcode.bin --arch x64
rekit run emulate-code ./stub.bin --arch arm64 --base 0x400000 --format json

Prerequisites

  • python3 ≥ 3.8 — Unicorn is installed under scripts/site (native; the local tree is platform-specific — rebuild with scripts/build.sh on a new platform).
  • On Apple Silicon, the build also vendors an x86_64 Unicorn runtime when Rosetta is available. Doctor probes x87 execution and register access in crash-isolated child processes and selects this lane explicitly if native Unicorn is unsafe.

See ../../docs/UNICORN-X87.md for the macOS ARM64 root cause, reproducer, fallback contract, and qualified environment.

Files

What ships with it

3 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 49 lines · 85 tokens per session scan A b3c526fb0175

Subscribe to this mod's changes

emulate-code is a skill published in the GitHub repository batteryshark/rekit (11 stars, last pushed 23d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 85 tokens to every session and 545 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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