Essential Open-Source Security Tools: From Vulnerability Scanning to AI Safety

Following Cybersecurity Awareness Month aims, we want to share information about open-source projects that can help enhance the security of your apps and organization and improve LLM security.

Nuclei is a high-performance, open-source vulnerability scanner known for its flexibility and speed. Key features include:

• YAML-Based Templates: Customizable templates simulate real-world vulnerability detection, ensuring accuracy and low false positives.
• High-Speed Scanning: Parallel processing and request clustering for rapid scans.
• Wide Protocol Support: Supports HTTP, TCP, DNS, SSL, WHOIS, and more.
• Integration: Easily integrates into CI/CD pipelines and tools like Jira, Splunk, and GitHub.
• Community-Contributed: Thousands of security professionals contribute to the constantly updated template library, enhancing coverage of trending vulnerabilities.

Purple Llama is an open-source project for responsible AI development, featuring:

Key Tools:

1. Llama Guard 3 – Input/output content moderation models
2. Prompt Guard – Protection against malicious prompts and jailbreaks
3. Code Shield – Filters insecure code during inference

Evaluation Tools:

• CyberSec Eval series (v1-v3) for testing AI security, including code safety, prompt injection, and cyber attack prevention

Licensing:

• Evals/Benchmarks: MIT License
• Safeguard tools: Various Llama Community Licenses

The project combines offensive (red team) and defensive (blue team) approaches to AI safety, focusing on cybersecurity and content safeguards.

The OWASP Amass Project is a powerful tool for mapping attack surfaces and performing external asset discovery. It uses both open-source information gathering and active reconnaissance techniques, combining APIs, certificate databases, DNS scanning, routing info, scraping, and WHOIS data to locate potential entry points.

Key Features:

• Asset Discovery: Comprehensive detection of subdomains, IPs, DNS records, and more.
• Data Sources: Integrates with APIs from tools like Shodan, VirusTotal, and GitHub, as well as public archives.
• Deployment Options: Offers CLI, Docker, and prebuilt packages for diverse environments.

Amass is widely used for security assessments by pentesters and red teams to identify vulnerabilities across large networks.

The MISP Project is an open-source platform for cyber threat intelligence sharing, supporting the analysis and sharing of threat data, malware information, and security incidents. Designed for cybersecurity professionals, MISP enables efficient information sharing and correlation of Indicators of Compromise (IOCs), helping organizations detect and respond to threats quickly.

Key features include:

• Data Sharing and Synchronization: Facilitates sharing across organizations, using both structured (JSON, STIX) and flexible formats for easy integration.
• Correlation Engine: Links indicators across incidents to highlight relationships, supported by a robust API and taxonomy for customization.
• User-Friendly Interface: Allows users to collaborate on data, with graphical views for visualizing relationships and streamlined reporting tools.

MISP’s flexible setup is widely adopted by enterprises and governments, enhancing collective defense against cyber threats.

Discover more content:

Security Automation playlist

The DevSec Voice podcast

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