This is a small device emulator tailored towards running Samsung’s S-BOOT and inspired by a QEMU version described here.

I hacked this together because static reversing felt time-consuming and difficult to correlate with the actual device behavior.

The code simulates enough of the devices to reach download mode (ODIN), and then processes odin commands received over stdio.

Some other interesting prior work is described here and here.

• libcapstone
• libunicorn

The included Makefile should work on OpenBSD. Untested on linux or other BSDs.

make emulate

The emulator assumes the base address of the second stage is 0x8f000000. You’ll need to obtain the firmware for the S9 and to extract the second-stage bootloader. The posts above describe well how to do this. After BL2 is extraced, you can run:

./emulate <sboot_bl2.bin>

You should see the emulated UART logging to stdout.

Based on a comparison of the emulator and device logs, there are a few significant deviations. Most notable is UFS: it is poorly implemented here and causes the emulator to pause as it encounters errors. Normally this would cause the device to drop into upload mode, but the emulator unprincipally redirects flow into download mode.

Even with these flaws, it can still be useful to observe the emulated behavior, changes in the heap state, and for fuzzing download mode.