Penguin

Requirements & limits

• Reviewed release: v3.1.21, published 2026-10-06 and tagged at the reviewed commit. Install by pulling the rehosting/penguin container from Docker Hub and installing its penguin wrapper script; source and Nix builds are documented separately.
• Input is a root-filesystem tarball with permissions and ownership preserved, made with the bundled fw2tar or by hand. Penguin uses whole-system emulation with a replacement kernel selected for the detected architecture; it does not reproduce the original device faithfully or recover source code. Failed rehostings are refined by editing the configuration and rerunning.
• The BAR 2025 workshop paper, co-located with NDSS, reports author-run results on 13,649 embedded Linux images from 69 vendors, with working rehostings for 75% more firmware than the prior state of the art. That evaluation predates this release.
• GPL-2.0-or-later; the README also carries a U.S. Government rights notice. Findings from the emulated system need analyst interpretation.

About this entry

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Matched by the same code repository or publication identifier.

• Target-Centric Firmware Rehosting with Penguin Research paper

Primary sources

1. README.md GitHub · rehosting/penguin · Revision b645cd2
2. LICENSE GitHub · rehosting/penguin · Revision b645cd2
3. docs/workflow.md GitHub · rehosting/penguin · Revision b645cd2
4. docs/schema_doc.md GitHub · rehosting/penguin · Revision b645cd2
5. https://github.com/rehosting/penguin/releases/tag/v3.1.21
6. https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-content/uploads/bar2025-final10.pdf