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....
Metasploit is one example: https://github.com/rapid7/metasploit-framework
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).
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 :/
In German: https://ht-strafrecht.de/blog/strafrecht/it-sicherheitslueck...
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.
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).
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