The agent no longer self-terminates on a 120s deadline: a VMI host may attach
at any time, so the beacon now polls its ack flag indefinitely and exits only
once the host sets it. The fixed lifetime was an artifact, not a requirement.
The contract drops from three constants to one. The companion magic is derived
as the byte-reversed primary (__builtin_bswap64, folded to an immediate at -O2),
giving the same 16-byte beacon signature from a single source of truth; the host
acknowledges by echoing that value into the ack slot instead of carrying a
separate ack constant.
Name and isolate the Windows engine as one of potentially several. The
public surface moves to include/win32.h with an opaque vmie_win32 handle
(vmie_win32_open/close/mem); the engine's Windows internals — host bring-up,
the struct-offset profile, process/module/PE/text decode — live under
src/engine/win32. The generic address-space layer stays in src/engine
(gva.c + engine-arch.h, carrying no offset table): gva.c is de-profiled, and
CR3 bring-up reaches the hot translator through a cold gva_translate bridge
so the zero-copy hot path stays private and inlinable.
A memory source is now first-class and public: vmie_mem_open/_open_segs/
_close open a flat dump (or an explicit segment map) as a vmie_mem, with
gpa_seg promoted to the public contract. The physical signature scan is
exposed source-agnostically: sig_scan_mem returns GPAs for any vmie_mem,
sig_scan_sources scans several sources with per-source attribution, and
sig_from_bytes builds an exact needle from a byte span. The pure matcher is
unchanged; dumps and the live engine image are scanned uniformly, neither
needing the other.
CORE (src/core): vmie_mem — guest-physical substrate with a data-driven
segment map (replaces the hardcoded 4 GiB PCI-hole topology). ENGINE
(src/engine): x86-64 paging + Windows bring-up; produces the generic memory
model. HANDLERS (src/handlers): the signature/value/pointer scanners, which
now consume an OS-agnostic contract.
Keystone: gva_ctx is split into vmie_mem (core) + vmie (engine); the generic
access functions take vmie_mem* + cr3 and no longer compile in the Windows
offset table. New public contract include/memmodel.h (vmie_mem, mem_view_t,
vregion, task, range, the gva_* access); win32 surface in include/vmie.h.
Leak relocations: the PE parser, UTF-16 decode and CR3-recovery heuristics
move engine-side; the matcher stays a pure, source-agnostic handler, and the
pointer scanner takes a generic range[] instead of reaching into the process
enumerator.
gva_ptr: leaf-bounded zero-copy guest reads. gva_sweep redesigned to drive
on it — large-page leaves are lent to the callback while 4K runs stay
buffered, and the run loop is guarded against wrap at the top of the address
space. gva_gpa fetches PTEs zero-copy; optional W32MS_LTO build option folds
the per-fetch call boundary (shipped -O2 default unchanged).
Correctness: subtract-form bounds check (no add overflow), memcpy decode in
place of type-punned wide loads, zero-init PDB name before compare,
PCI-hole-crossing range rejection, single-sourced VA_CANON and USER bounds.
hot/cold attributes audited across the translation and scan path.
Static library over a flat RW mmap of guest RAM: GPA/GVA paging walks,
beacon-driven bootstrap, dynamic struct-offset profiling, process and
module enumeration, a region map, and value/pointer/signature scanners on
a shared windowed sweep. Public API in include/; internals under src/.
Thin CLI demonstrator over the public API. Guest agent cross-compiled to
Windows x86-64 via mingw-w64. CMake: static library + CLI + guest target,
C17.
lirent
