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cxgRelease notes

All versions since 1.3.0

All versions

1.3.0 Latest

Added

Desktop application pentesting

  • cxg pentest run --target-type electron — launch, isolate, and probe Electron desktop applications. cxg starts N isolated app instances (via --app-cmd or --app-binary), drives their renderers over CDP, and additionally probes IPC channels, renderer security configuration, and local data at rest. Add --host-scan-path to also scan an existing installation directory. Tauri is explicitly unsupported — it exposes no CDP endpoint on macOS or Linux.

Out-of-band (OAST) callback confirmation

  • --oast-interactsh [<server>] — cxg registers an interactsh session it owns and polls it, so a callback becomes a genuine confirmed=true finding with the interaction recorded as evidence. This is different from --oast <host>, which only injects a callback URL that cxg cannot read back (e.g. Burp Collaborator or a canary you host): under --oast, blind probes (SSRF, blind SQLi/XXE/cmd-injection) fall back to status-code and timing heuristics and findings stay unconfirmed — reading the callback is the operator’s job, in their own tooling. The two flags conflict at the CLI level deliberately: two canaries would leave “was this confirmed?” with no single answer per finding.

Crash recovery for desktop targets

  • --no-restart — do not relaunch a desktop target that dies mid-scan (the run ends with a truncation caveat and exit code 3).
  • --stall-timeout <secs> — idle-time bound that catches a frozen app (electron only).
  • --template-timeout <secs> — absolute per-template dispatch ceiling (a backstop).

Non-interactive CI authentication

  • cxg pentest auth import — write an auth profile from a session captured once and exported as a Playwright storage_state, with no browser. The state can come from a file, from stdin (--storage-state -), or from the base64 environment variable CXG_AUTH_STATE_<NAME>.
  • cxg pentest auth verify — liveness-check a saved session (exit 0 alive / non-zero dead) before a run spends any AI budget.
  • cxg pentest run --ci (also enabled by CXG_CI=1) — a dead or expired auth session becomes a hard failure with exit code 5 at pre-flight, so a pipeline never silently probes unauthenticated.
  • --auth-dir <dir> — read/write auth profiles from a directory other than ~/.cert-x-gen/auth, so CI can restore a bundle of imported profiles and point the run at it.

AI generation

  • bridge AI provider — posts each prompt to $BUGB_BRIDGE_URL (with Authorization: Bearer $BUGB_BRIDGE_TOKEN when set) and reads the completion back; an editor/CI integration point rather than a local CLI. It is preferred first by --ai-provider auto whenever $BUGB_BRIDGE_URL is set.

Reporting

  • threat_id on findings in report.json, linking each finding back to the originating guardlink hypothesis (null for AI- or mutation-synthesised probes).
  • review_only_threats in report.json (electron): routeless guardlink threats that have no IPC channel to test, surfaced for manual review rather than silently dropped.
  • Engine-stamped actor provenance — every request now records which captured identity issued it, which feeds cross-identity (IDOR / privilege-escalation) triage in the report and audit log.

Templates

  • @requires_capability template header — a probe declares a substrate capability it needs; the engine skips any template whose capability the running substrate does not provide, instead of recording an undefined-namespace error as a refutation.

Environment

  • CXG_NO_NAG — opt out of the occasional one-line post-scan GitHub-star request (which prints only on an interactive terminal and at most once a week).

Changed

  • --help restructured into functional groups, with a two-tier split: -h shows one terse line per flag, --help shows the full explanation. cxg scan -h went from 375 lines to 95.
  • The ASCII banner is now suppressed whenever stdout is not a terminal. cxg --version is a single, parseable line, and piped output is clean — previously the banner corrupted cxg search --format json | jq. Explicit overrides remain: CXG_NO_BANNER, --quiet/-q.
  • Configuration sections are now optional. A partial config file loads, with omitted sections and omitted keys taking their compiled-in defaults.
  • A configuration file that still contains a sandbox section still loads. cxg now prints a warning on load, and cxg config validate reports the file as loadable-with-obsolete-sections rather than valid, stating that the settings never took effect and that template execution is not confined. Silently ignoring the keys would leave operators believing they are hardened.
  • cxg sandbox — the command that manages per-language dependency environments — is unaffected and unchanged in behaviour. Its help text and docs no longer describe it as providing “isolation” or “security”: it separates packages, not privileges.
  • A started Docker environment with auto_start no longer implies the running command is contained by it. cxg now says explicitly that the command executes on the host; use cxg sandbox enter to work inside the container.
  • docs/SANDBOX_GUIDE.md renamed to docs/DEPENDENCY_ENVIRONMENTS.md, matching what it documents.

Fixed

  • cert-x-gen.example.yaml now loads through the config parser. It previously failed to load on a required field that had no default; a regression test now loads it on every build.
  • Fewer false “confirmed” pentest findings: the empty-evidence guard no longer mistakes a finding carrying only bookkeeping keys for one that the AI confirmed with real evidence.
  • Documentation was aligned with actual behaviour across README.md and the --help tree — false and stale claims were removed or corrected (see Notes below).

Removed

The sandbox configuration section, which never took effect.

  • Removed the sandbox section from the configuration schema: sandbox.enabled, sandbox.memory_limit_mb, sandbox.cpu_limit_percent, sandbox.network_access and sandbox.filesystem_access, along with the NetworkAccess and FilesystemAccess enums.

    These settings never did anything. No code path has ever read them to confine, throttle, or restrict template execution. Their only consumer was ResourceManager, which was never constructed outside its own unit test. A configuration setting sandbox.enabled: true with filesystem_access: readonly and network_access: none produced a run identical to one with no sandbox configuration at all: the template read the process uid and username, listed the user’s home directory, confirmed .ssh was readable, spawned a child process, and made an outbound DNS query. Any configuration relying on these keys was not protected by them, and cxg config validate reported such a file as simply valid.

    Templates execute as ordinary child processes with the invoking user’s privileges and full network and filesystem access. Review templates before running them. For isolation, run cxg itself inside a container or VM, as a non-privileged user.

  • Removed ResourceManager from src/scheduler.rs, and the now-unreachable Error variants ResourceLimitExceeded and SandboxViolation (with the Error::resource_limit constructor) — no cxg error path can report a limit or a violation, because no limit or confinement is enforced anywhere.

Dead configuration keys.

  • 36 dead configuration keys and the unused metrics module. Every one of these keys was parsed but had no effect. Existing config files that still set them continue to load — the keys are simply ignored.
    • (a) Removed, no plan to reinstate: global.{verbosity,color,log_level,log_file,debug}, templates.{use_system_templates,use_user_templates,use_local_templates,auto_update,cache_dir}, network.{http2,dns_servers,follow_redirects}, execution.{threads,passive_mode,safe_mode,cache_enabled}, output.stream, metrics.{enabled,export_port,export_format}, plugins.{enabled,directories,plugins}, ai.fallback_providers, ai.cost_tracking.*, ai.cache.*. (network.follow_redirects was removed as a config key only; the --follow-redirects flag is unaffected.)
    • (b) Removed, but plausible candidates to reinstate wired up later — these describe things a config file could reasonably control, and were removed because they lied, not because the capability is unwanted: output.min_severity, output.formats, output.output_dir, output.output_file, templates.enabled_languages.

Notes — accepted-and-ignored surface

Stated plainly so it produces no more false leads:

  • Template execution is NOT sandboxed. Despite earlier “sandboxed by default” claims in this changelog and the README, no execution path isolates or resource-limits templates: they run as ordinary child processes with the invoking user’s privileges and full network and filesystem access. Run cxg inside a container or VM if you need isolation. (cxg sandbox manages per-language dependency environments — it does not confine template execution.) The sandbox config section that appeared to configure confinement is removed in this release, and a config still carrying it now warns rather than loading silently — see Removed.
  • Nine cxg scan flags are accepted and silently ignored: --protocol, --protocols, --threads, --stream, --resume, --distributed, --coordinator, --worker-id, --profile. They are now grouped under a “Not Implemented” heading in --help.
  • cxg server is not implemented — it exits with an error; its --tls*, --port, --bind, and --auth-token flags are accepted but do nothing.
  • Runtime templates are distributed separately, in the cert-x-gen-templates repository, and installed to ~/.cert-x-gen/templates/. No template count is stated here.