Unicorn Engine VS imessage

OFRAK Tetris is a project I started at work about two weeks ago. It's a web-based game that works on desktop and mobile. I made it for my company to bring to events like DEF CON, and to promote our binary analysis and patching framework called OFRAK.

In the game, 32-bit, little-endian ARM assembly instructions fall, and you can modify the operands before executing them on a CPU emulator. There are two segments mapped – one for instructions, and one for data (though both have read, write, and execute permissions). Your score is a four byte signed integer stored at the virtual address pointed to by the R12 register, and the goal is to use the instructions that fall to make the score value in memory as high as possible. When it's game over, you can download your game as an ELF to relive the glory in GDB on your favorite ARM device.

The CPU emulator is a version of Unicorn (https://www.unicorn-engine.org/) that has been cross-compiled to WebAssembly (https://alexaltea.github.io/unicorn.js/), so everything on the page runs in the browser without the need for any complicated infrastructure on the back end.

Since I've only been working on this for a short period of time leading up to its debut at DEF CON, there are still many more features I'd eventually like to implement. These include adding support for other ISAs besides ARM, adding an instruction reference manual, and lots of little cleanups, bug fixes, and adjustments.

My highest score is 509,644,979, but my average is about 131,378.

I look forward to feedback, bug reports, feature requests, and strategy discussions!

Entails hundreds of hours of single-stepping through that opcode in Linux kernel using an indirect operand pointing toward its own opcode (self-modifying code).

Even the extraordinaire Fabrice Bellard (author of QEMU) admitted that it is broke and did a total rewrite, which fixed tons of other issues.

https://github.com/unicorn-engine/unicorn/issues/364

Macdu (Vita3K dev) also stated that this game is CPU bound so they used a CPU emulator known as unicorn2 , this is also the reason for the slow speed

This is how I found out a snippet of assembly code that can actually distinguished between a KVM hypervisor and most of today’s emulator.

https://github.com/unicorn-engine/unicorn/issues/364

Unicorn is missing from that list.

The python CPU emulator with full program counter (PC) and general (and other CPU-specific) register set controls.

I use it to catch fileless malware in the second fastest dynamic manner. Also good for detecting Rowhammer/SPECTRE behaviors.

Disclaimer: one of the contributors and a contractor that frequently deploy this.

https://github.com/unicorn-engine/unicorn

The nothing website claims:

> Nothing Chats is built on Sunbird's platform and all Chats messages are end-to-end encrypted, meaning neither we nor Sunbird can access the messages you're sending and receiving.

> Nothing is powered by Sunbird, and Sunbird's architecture provides a system to deliver a message from one user to another without ever storing it at any point in its journey. Messages are not stored on Sunbird's servers and are only live on your device – once a message is delivered, it can only be recovered locally from your personal device.

From: https://us.nothing.tech/pages/nothing-chats

The Verge claims:

> Marques Brownlee has also had a preview of Nothing Chats. He confirmed with Nothing that, similar to how other iMessage-to-Android bridge services have worked before, “...it’s literally signing in on some Mac Mini in a server farm somewhere, and that Mac Mini will then do all of the routing for you to make this happen.”

From: https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/14/23960516/nothing-chats-i...

It seems to me like if they are doing the typical thing of using a bridge like https://github.com/mautrix/imessage then that isn't really E2EE, the messages are being stored, and could be accessed by Sunbird. I don't really see how their claims could be true. Does anyone know? Am I missing something?

If you're willing to dive deep into self-hosting, the open source chat protocol Matrix.org has support for an in-development iMessage bridge. Once you get it to work, there's a Matrix.org client on KaiOS devices called Chooj (sideloading guide) made by Farooq that you can use to access the chat.

iMessage bridge

The disadvantage of not offering an API for iMessage is that there is no easy way to block clients. Apps like Bluebubbles have to work by being installed on an actual Mac and scraping messages from iMessage and Beeper uses a similar architecture[0]. Presumably they have a data centre full of actual macs (or VMs).

[0] https://github.com/mautrix/imessage

I have an old Mac Mini rotting on a shelf in my cupboard which is my bridge to the world of Apple shit. It primarily runs two bits of software: OpenHaystack, which I used to run my own object trackers over the Apple Find My network and Mautrix iMessage which I used to access iMessage via Matrix on my Android and Windows devices.

I've switched from iPhone to a de-googled Android device, and am generally trying to extract myself from google and apple ecosystem lock-in. The last piece for me is trying to find a reasonable bridge for iMessages - but the baseline requirement is to have a Mac PC running 24x7 to act as a bridge for matrix or airmessage. Here's my question: the hardware and software requirements for iMessages are pretty minimal. MacOS Big Sur implemented a few messaging bits like inline replies which I'd like to keep, so that's my OS baseline. Has anyone managed to strip down a hackintosh hardware installation to absolutely minimal proxmox hardware demands (e.g. ram/cores)? If so, got a recommendation on an efficient build process?

I know how crazy it is in America, but I think at leat the HN crowd wouldn't be participating in that madness.

If you are disparate enough, you can use a matrix bridge to get blue bubbles from anywhere

https://github.com/mautrix/imessage

Yes, tulir works for beeper. But I think they stopped doing that iPhone thing, and if you use iOS there are less features available: https://github.com/mautrix/imessage/blob/master/ROADMAP.md

I have an Android phone and if you're desperate you can buy an old Mac Mini and set up an iMessage bridge over Matrix (https://github.com/mautrix/imessage) or BlueBubbles to work around this. I do not recommend it though as it locks you into a facet of the Apple ecosystem.