Show HN: Nightcrawler – A local AI pentesting agent running on a smartphone | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Nightcrawler – A local AI pentesting agent running on a smartphone

github.com

120 pointsNickySlicks35 comments

The following rant is not against the owner/project - but...

What an irony. I cant publish a attack surface mapping / pentesting tool i wrote which runs fully deterministic and really controlable due to "dual use" legal problems - but llm driven tools hit public space......

sorry for the rant....

Completely understand, the legal landscape has really shifted around AI/LLM tools. I see tools drop everyday that spit in the face of DMCA/Copyright law but they skirt by mainly because they leverage AI

That has nothing to do with LLMs or not. If they were to "code" the same tool with an LLM, or build a LLM version of it, in Germany (where rthey are residing) they would face the same consequences.

Our legal system in that regard is total BS, when it comes to the so called "Hacker Paragraph". This comes with a sentence tht can range from a fine to up to one year prison time, just for producing such a tool. So if the police would actually - even if they had not published it - computer... well. They could be potentially "f**ed" (depending on how a judge would decide).

Are you referring to GitHub policies? I haven’t seen issues like that from people publishing security tools before.

Metasploit is one example: https://github.com/rapid7/metasploit-framework

No im referring to the legal terms of germany, the country im residing at. Our laws regarding "hacking" are arguable the strictest and worst.

The problem is that they are formulated in a way that it is super easy to have your software being possible "dual use" and that a judge has to decide if its fine or not. Making it worse it also states your "intention" which well is impossible to proof - if the judge says he doesn't believe your intentions are only good, you can literally get massively sued.

So ye i could move to another country and than publish it - apart from that i can let it rot on my hdd (which is prolly what will happen).

Edit: Additionally mentioned, it is not just the publishing in germany, even the facilitating already which is why i don't even have an article about it (any more).

Really? Have there been any cases yet?

I'm asking cuz I started devloping a c2+agent+BOF kind of thing with custom bytecode vm for the lulz (to learn how stuff works nowadays) and it's on tangled and github :/

Yes. More than one. This one was especially "interesting", a security researcher was tasked by a company to evaluate the ERP (I believe would be the acronym) software. Diiscovered an external database connection, looked at it, discovered this external DB contained sensitive information from other clients of that vendor - reported it, got sued, lost.

In German: https://ht-strafrecht.de/blog/strafrecht/it-sicherheitslueck...

Ouch, that's pathetic. Hm, maybe I'll leave it then. Not worth the hassle. Although I don't really think someone would hunt me for random non-prod github repos

Ye you should be really careful on that one. If just somebody with a bad mood reports you, even if you have absolutely good intentions, it can cost you and if its just in spendings in a lawyer to proof that your fine....

Intentions are very often a factor when it comes to law, and rightfully so. The problems come when you classify some category of software as "dangerous" by default. Software is special in that it can't be a "controlled substance". So everyone needs to have the tools to increase their security. That includes access to "offensive tools" to study what they do. A recent example was the Huggingface attack.

As I understand the hole shebang, the German law is about "does the court think you are `hacking` something?" -- this is against the law.

Yes, there was one German pentester that got sued, because he reported a BASE64 encoded, hardcoded authentication token in an application. Not that I would wish him anything like that and am ashamed by the outcome, I also recall that he might have tried to put pressure on the vendor by doing an interview with a blogger or so?

On the other hand, I do not know of any cases regarding publication of dual-use tools as OSS.

So would it be fair to say this is less about deterministic vs. LLM-driven tools, and more about software published out of New York vs. software published out of Germany?

Yes and no. I have seen (not wanne name them now to not bring them into a bad context) several tools coming from germany which are well in questionable contexts but due to basically beein advertised as full LLM/AI driven its somehow not on anyones radar. So that is kinda a thing.

But sure location itself also plays a role no question.

If getting it out there in the world is more important to you than stamping your name on it, pass it out to a friend who can publish it. Continue any related development in private. They can't stop you from distributing something they don't know you're developing.

Well its not like i didn't consider it, but it heavily relies on stuff that i have written and that is well only used by me till this day. So arguably, publishing it this way it would still have like "points" which make it extremely related to only me.

Also asked the lawyer in consulted about it... i would be a heavy gamble

This is really regrettable. I think the biggest issue is that once such laws or case law are in place, it is really really impossible to repeal them, or to replace them with something more modern. So we're still applying horse laws to cars 100 years later.

Why phone? This cuts out a lot of phones. Why not on a computer?

Many kids don’t have a computer

Are kids the target audience of this tool?

Yes

Why?

Only kids care about pentesting from their phone

I used to red team professionally, and it is a lot easier to sneak an unauthorized phone into a facility than a computer.

Agreed. Also less noticeable when "accidentally" dropped/left, especially in tight spaces out of view. And better odds of plausible deniability if caught or device is later found and somehow traced to you.

This looks interesting. My current phone is an Asus ROG Phone 3, which I think suffices (Snapdragon 865+ plus 12Gb RAM) but isn't rooted. Even on outdated Android 12 this phone covers everything I could possibly need as-is, and I don't intend to replace it. But, this might be the final push to upgrade ROM to something newer. I saw crDroid 16.0 still supports this ROG variant.

Will this work with Nethunter Rootless, or ir Magisk support w/root imperative?

Judas Priest reference?

What does the 50% look like when it fails? Garbage the parser throws out is easy to handle, but a well formed command aimed at the wrong host gets past the scope check, and you would only catch that reading the report afterward.

Fantastic project! Out of curiosity, do you foresee any optimization paths (like model quantization) that could lower the memory footprint down the road

Very cool project. Any plans to support running larger local models as mobile NPUs keep improving?

I completely forgot that AI can very much also attack networks/devices in the wild. Interesting project.

little bit unrelated, but I watched the IG video and I thought the visual design of the app was cool af! what inspired the style?

Will this work on iphones as well.

I built Nightcrawler, an open-source autonomous penetration-testing agent that runs entirely on an Android phone.

The project started with a question: how much of a real pentesting workflow could I run locally on relatively old mobile hardware, without relying on a cloud model or API?

Nightcrawler runs a 1.2B-parameter model locally on the Adreno GPU of a OnePlus 8. The model chooses targets and tools, while a separate scope-enforcement proxy validates every command before execution. The system maintains per-host memory in SQLite, rotates between targets, matches detected versions against a local CVE database, executes multi-step playbooks, and generates a structured report.

A few implementation details that may be interesting:

Local inference runs at roughly 115 prompt tokens/sec and 13 generated tokens/sec. The small model only produces a usable command around 50% of the time, so much of the engineering is recovery logic, duplicate detection, persistent memory, and deterministic playbooks. Every command passes through a separate scope and safety layer rather than trusting the model to remain in scope. The project includes a dry-run mode, so the agent loop can be tested without executing real network commands or owning the phone hardware. I've had it running on my home network for the past 3 months uninterrupted

Have you ever tested this on a real corporate network?

So far only against four authorized networks. One of them was a corporate network. Left it overnight and it only found one minor week old CVE that I'm sure the IT team already had on their tracker. But showed that the proof of concept worked.

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