Show HN: Revenant – automatic LLM powered reverse engineering
Revenant is an open-source toolkit that uses LLMs (Claude, OpenAI, local AI) together with reverse engineering tools like radare2 and Ghidra to automate firmware analysis, hardware bringup, and even replicate old firmware to resurrect legacy hardware using modern toolchains.
Background
- Revenant is a new open-source tool that uses large language models (LLMs like Claude and GPT) to automate reverse engineering of firmware — the low-level software embedded in hardware devices like routers, IoT gadgets, and old electronics.
- It builds on existing reverse engineering frameworks (radare2, Ghidra) that are powerful but require deep manual expertise. The idea is to let an LLM handle the tedious parts: figuring out a device's pinout, writing code to interface with its hardware, or even recreating its firmware from scratch.
- "Firmware" is the permanent software on a hardware device's read-only memory. Reverse engineering it is how you repurpose old gadgets, find security vulnerabilities, or understand what a device does when you don't have documentation.
- The project targets two kinds of users: security researchers analyzing potentially malicious firmware, and hardware enthusiasts trying to resurrect obsolete devices that no longer have vendor support.