tracea

Trace anything running — hooks, calls, memory, network — with evidence, through your agent.

The dynamic half of reverse engineering, built for AI coding agents.

🚧 Status: under active development. v0.1 (network evidence engine) ships this week; v1.0 launches November 2026. See the roadmap. Stars watch the build. 📈

Static-analysis MCPs tell your agent what software looks like. tracea shows your agent what software does — spawn it, hook it, trace it, capture its traffic — and returns every finding as a structured Evidence Record, so the agent cites proof instead of guessing.

• Runtime, not guesses — API hooks, syscall summaries, memory inspection, HTTP/TLS/DNS reconstruction from live traffic or pcaps

• Evidence over assertion — every result carries observation, artifacts, confidence, and explicit limitations

• Token-efficient by design — deduplicated summaries + artifact references; never a 10 MB strace dump in your context window

• Works where you already work — Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI via MCP; or standalone CLI

The one-liner (shipping with v0.1)

uvx tracea setup

Detects your agents, backs up configs, registers the MCP server, installs matching workflow instructions. Restart your agent and ask:

Trace what this app actually does at startup, hook its crypto calls,
and show me the evidence.

Or use it straight from the terminal:

tracea net-pcap-summary capture.pcap --json
tracea run-diff run-a run-b        # what changed between two runs?
tracea evidence-export --html      # standalone, shareable report

Related MCP server: DEA

What you can trace (v1 — 24 tools)

How tracea works

Agent (Claude Code / Codex / Cursor / Gemini CLI)
        │  MCP (stdio)
┌───────▼────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  tracea MCP server (Python, FastMCP)            │
│  • 24 tools   • session manager   • evidence DB │
└───────┬────────────────────────────────────────┘
        │ provider adapters
   ┌────┴─────┬──────────┬───────────┬──────────┐
   ▼          ▼          ▼           ▼          ▼
 Frida      adb        /proc       mitmproxy   dpkt

The agent calls a tracea tool → tracea drives the mature instrumentation stack → findings come back as Evidence Records, not raw dumps:

{
  "id": "ev_01HZX...",
  "tool": "android_hook_java",
  "provider": "frida",
  "target": "com.example.app",
  "observation": "SharedPreferences.getString('api_key') from AntiTamper.check()",
  "confidence": "observed",
  "artifacts": [{"type": "stacktrace", "ref": "artifacts/0001.txt"}],
  "limitations": ["string value not captured (hook depth 1)"]
}

observed outranks inferred. Every record states what it couldn't see. That's the whole philosophy.

The Hugging Face suite

Who is this for

• Security researchers — triage, malware lab analysis, pinning checks, protocol documentation

• Developers — "why does our release build phone home?" answered with evidence, not vibes

• Agent builders — give your agent runtime perception; eval against TraceBench

• Software preservationists — understand abandoned binaries by watching them run

Ethics

tracea is for authorized analysis only: your apps, your devices, your captures, your labs. No DRM circumvention, no piracy tooling, no malware development. Evidence exports redact high-entropy secrets by default. Full policy in docs.

Roadmap

v0.1 network engine → v0.3 native processes + setup wizard → v0.5 Android + Space demo → v1.0 launch (Nov 2026). Details in docs/ROADMAP.md.

Credits & ecosystem

• Built with Frida, scapy, FastMCP

• Evidence philosophy inspired by morluto/rea — the static half. tracea is the dynamic half.

• Ideas from the whole agentic-RE community: ida-pro-mcp, GhidraMCP, hooker

License

MIT © 2026 Nabid Nur