Search: “open-toolkit”

Hottest cybersecurity open-source tools of the month: August 2026

August's open-source security roundup highlights NVIDIA SkillSpector for AI agent skill scanning, Future AGI, Chainloop, PentestGPT, and Hazmat agent containment.

Help Net Security's August 2026 roundup covers five open-source tools: NVIDIA's SkillSpector, a scanner that assesses AI agent skills from directories, zips, SKILL.md files, or Git URLs and returns findings and risk scores; Future AGI, an Apache 2.0 platform for tracing, evaluating, simulating, and guardrailing LLM agents; Chainloop, a software supply chain evidence store that produces signed in-toto attestations in CI pipelines; PentestGPT, an agentic penetration testing framework running recon, exploit, and reporting stages; and Hazmat, which runs AI coding agents like Claude Code and Codex inside a separate machine account for containment.

Help Net Security·Aug 26, 00:00 UTC · 21d agoTools

Open-Source AI & Open Models Reading List

Interconnects publishes a curated open-model reading list covering release strategy, US-China competition, adoption data, and a narrowed 4-6 month open-closed frontier gap.

The list, updated September 11, 2026, compiles essays on open-model strategy, licensing gradients, safety of open weights, adoption data, and Chinese open-source history. It notes leading open models have come from Chinese labs since roughly 2024, citing Kimi K3 and GLM-5.2/5.3, and that the open-closed gap has narrowed to roughly 4-6 months. It also documents Western adoption of Chinese models, including Perplexity's use of DeepSeek R1 and Thomson Reuters moving to Qwen, which has drawn lawmaker probes at DoorDash, Airbnb, Anysphere/Cursor, and Apple.

Interconnects·Sep 11, 12:36 UTC · 4d agoAI industry1

ToolHive: The open-source way to run any MCP server securely

Stacklok's open-source ToolHive runs Model Context Protocol servers in isolated containers with per-request identity enforcement, audit logging and a signed registry.

ToolHive, shipped under Apache 2.0, containersizes MCP servers locally via Docker or Podman or in clusters through a Kubernetes operator, applying permissions, network filtering, and secrets management. The platform includes a Registry Server implementing the official MCP Registry API with signing and provenance verification, a Virtual MCP Server gateway with OIDC/OAuth single sign-on and OpenTelemetry traces, and a desktop Portal for one-click installs. The browser-based cloud UI is retired, so the desktop app and CLI are the supported rollout paths.

Help Net Security·Sep 7, 00:00 UTC · 9d agoAI tools & infra1

Codex bundles LibreOffice

OpenAI's Codex desktop app bundles 1.7GB of runtimes including full Python, Node.js, Poppler, git, and LibreOffice binaries.

Blogger Simon Willison found that the OpenAI Codex desktop app (since rebranded to ChatGPT) keeps about 1.7GB in a ~/.cache/codex-runtimes/codex-primary-runtime folder, including full Python and Node.js installations plus native binaries for Poppler, git, and the LibreOffice office suite. Bundled skills in the plugins directory instruct Codex on how to find and use these binaries. The observation highlights the heavyweight local runtime stack shipped with agentic coding tools.

Simon Willison·Sep 1, 19:03 UTC · 14d agoAI tools & infra1

Google Open-Sources Mantis: A Modular Skills Toolkit That Lets Coding Agents Find, Reproduce and Patch Vulnerabilities

Google open-sourced Mantis, an Apache-2.0 modular skills toolkit that lets AI coding agents find, reproduce, and patch vulnerabilities with sandboxed verification.

Google released Mantis on GitHub under Apache 2.0 as a stack-agnostic set of slash-command skills that chain through the full vulnerability lifecycle: mining version history, building threat models, filtering findings, reproducing bugs in gVisor or network-disabled VMs, assembling exploit chains, patching, and scoring residual risk from 1 to 10. It runs with Gemini CLI, Antigravity CLI, the Google ADK, or comparable agent frameworks, and a supervisor skill (/mantis-meta-agent) can drive the whole loop. Google says the design targets the sub-7 percent true-positive rate of naive AI code scanning, and that its hierarchical summary tree cuts token overhead by over 85 percent. The toolkit is deployable for local and internal evaluation but not yet recommended for production.

MarkTechPost·Sep 9, 22:58 UTC · 6d agoAI tools & infra

Introducing the Admin plugin for ChatGPT Work and Codex

OpenAI launched an Admin plugin for ChatGPT Work and Codex to manage workspace usage, members, permissions, and limits.

OpenAI introduced an Admin plugin for ChatGPT Work and Codex aimed at enterprise workspace administration. The plugin lets administrators analyze workspace usage, manage members and permissions, adjust usage limits, and act on admin requests. The announcement is a routine product feature launch with no security incident or vulnerability details.

OpenAI News·Aug 25, 00:00 UTC · 22d agoAI industry

The OpenClaw 2.0 release moves your sessions into SQLite

OpenClaw 2.0 migrates AI agent sessions to SQLite, adds guided credential setup, and flags shared-session controls as not a security boundary.

OpenClaw 2.0, described as the largest update in the project's history, migrates sessions and transcripts into SQLite and adds guided setup that detects existing AI credentials from Codex, ChatGPT, Claude CLI sign-ins, API keys, and local Ollama or LM Studio models. The release expands multiplayer sharing while explicitly stating its permission controls are not tenant isolation or a security boundary, and that revoked access can briefly remain usable. Startup JavaScript requests fell from 140 to 45 and startup time from about 1.6 seconds to 575 milliseconds in simulated tests against a mocked Gateway. Automation wrappers must now inspect reported health because requesting --json does not waive risk acknowledgement.

Help Net Security·Aug 31, 00:00 UTC · 16d agoAI tools & infra1

[AINews] OpenAI shuts off Cursor

OpenAI cut off API access to coding tool Cursor after its SpaceX acquisition, citing contract violations by Elon Musk's companies.

OpenAI disabled Cursor's access following the closing of Cursor's acquisition by SpaceX, citing its experience with Elon Musk's companies violating contracts; Cursor responded that OpenAI accounts for only 5% of its traffic. The weekly digest also covers major open-weight releases: Z.ai's GLM-5.3 (744B total/40B active, 1M context) and Tencent's Hy4-preview (770B/49B, ~#5 on Code Arena WebDev), plus Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Flash (125B/6B). vLLM published benchmarks showing no universal winner among speculative decoding methods across model families.

Latent Space·Aug 29, 05:11 UTC · 18d agoAI industry

How loveholidays is making everyone a builder with Codex

loveholidays uses OpenAI Codex to let business teams build software, shortening the path from ideas to shipped products.

OpenAI published a customer story describing how travel company loveholidays deploys Codex to make software development accessible across business teams. The company says the approach helps non-engineers turn ideas into products faster. The piece is a vendor case study rather than new technical or research output.

OpenAI News·Aug 26, 00:00 UTC · 21d agoAI industry

Hunting Vulnerabilities Using Frontier Models

Okta used frontier AI models GPT-5.5 Cyber and Mythos via OpenAI and Anthropic programs to scan millions of code lines for vulnerabilities.

Okta describes using frontier AI models, including GPT-5.5 Cyber Preview (TAC) and Mythos Preview, through OpenAI's Daybreak Cyber Partner Program and Anthropic's Project Glasswing to hunt vulnerabilities across its product codebase. The team built a custom Python orchestrator with strong isolation, vendor-agnostic model support, and four distinct scanning pipelines executed as isolated Codex or Claude Code sessions with progressive context loading to reduce context bloat. Human experts and AI agents worked both autonomously and in paired hunts, and Okta reports the best results when humans and agents taught each other.

Okta Security·Sep 8, 00:00 UTC · 8d agoResearch

Multi-Step Tool-Calling over Korean Open Public APIs: A Benchmark and a Data-Synthesis Recipe

Researchers introduce KOPA-Bench, a 145-task Korean public API tool-calling benchmark, and EDGE, an execution-grounded data synthesis method.

An arXiv paper presents KOPA-Bench, a benchmark of 145 real-world tasks chaining multiple tool-calls across live Korean government APIs, motivated by data-sovereignty requirements for on-premise open-source LLM agents. It also introduces EDGE, an execution-grounded dynamic graph that keeps only tool-output-to-input links verified by live API calls before synthesizing executable multi-step trajectories. A 9B model fine-tuned with GRPO on the resulting dataset nearly matches its untuned 27B family sibling on KOPA-Bench and improves on the BFCL benchmark.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 4, 17:44 UTC · 11d agoAI research1

Advancing price-performance for developers with GPT‑5.6 in Kiro

OpenAI's GPT-5.6 is now available in the Kiro developer platform, offering developers improved price-performance for planning, building, reviewing, and testing software.

OpenAI announced that GPT-5.6 is now available in Kiro, a developer platform for planning, building, reviewing, and testing software. The announcement emphasizes better price-performance for developer workloads rather than new model capabilities. This expands the commercial availability of OpenAI models in third-party coding tools.

OpenAI News·Aug 24, 12:00 UTC · 22d agoAI industry

OpenWAM: An Open, Modular Exploration Towards Systematic World-Action Model Pretraining

OpenWAM releases an open modular stack for world-action model pretraining, plus OpenWAM-alpha trained on about 6,400 hours of egocentric and robot data.

OpenWAM is an open research stack that factorizes World-Action Model pretraining into composable infrastructure, study, and model components with unified training, inference, and evaluation. Controlled experiments distill three principles on knowledge inheritance, world-action synergy, and out-of-domain generalization gains from embodied co-training. The resulting OpenWAM-alpha, pretrained on roughly 6,400 hours of egocentric human and robot data, achieves top-tier results across eight simulation benchmarks and real-robot tests spanning single-arm, bimanual, and dexterous embodiments. The full stack, including infrastructure, evaluation protocols, pretrained models, and data recipes, is released openly.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 6, 20:00 UTC · 9d agoAI research

An open letter to Dario: if you mean it, open the weights

Open letter urges Dario Amodei to champion a law forcing all publicly released AI models to ship as open weights, arguing regulation otherwise gets captured.

A blogger responds to Anthropic's essay 'We Must Pace the Frontier' by proposing a law requiring any AI model offered to the public be released as open weights, citing Anthropic's 'Fable' and OpenAI's 'Astra' as examples. The author argues frontier lab valuations depend on proprietary weights, so mandatory openness would cut funding for future training runs and slow progress across all labs. The letter contends regulatory approaches like embedded evaluators, compute thresholds, and antitrust waivers inevitably lead to regulatory capture favoring incumbents. It appeals to Amodei's record on safety, export controls, and Anthropic's PBC structure to back the proposal.

Hacker News · AI·Sep 12, 19:15 UTC · 3d agoAI policyHN 40↑ · 1 comments1

Stampli cuts launch hours by 68% using ChatGPT Work

AP automation firm Stampli used OpenAI Codex and ChatGPT Work to cut product launch production hours by 68%.

Stampli, an accounts-payable automation company, compressed weeks of launch production into days using Codex and ChatGPT Work. Facing a fixed deadline with design resources committed elsewhere, the team reported a 68% reduction in launch hours. The piece is an OpenAI customer adoption case study.

OpenAI News·Aug 20, 00:00 UTC · 27d agoAI industry

Notes on gotchas while migrating 35kb preprompts from Opus to self-hosted Ollama

Opinion piece urges migrating 35KB preprompts from Anthropic/OpenAI to self-hosted Ollama, citing session privacy risks and safety filters blocking security research.

The author documents gotchas migrating 35KB preprompts from Claude Opus to self-hosted Ollama, motivated by fears that frontier providers train on user sessions, citing the OpenAI Navier-Stokes controversy. The piece argues inference providers cannot audit their own retention or training pipelines and that only self-hosted hardware offers verifiable privacy. It also criticizes frontier safety filters for refusing vulnerability research tasks and calls for models that support exploitability testing in CI/CD pipelines.

Hacker News · AI·Sep 14, 13:59 UTC · 1d agoAI industryHN 41↑ · 13 comments1

How law firm Gilbert + Tobin governs and scales AI with OpenAI

OpenAI details how law firm Gilbert + Tobin scales ChatGPT Enterprise and Codex firm-wide under CEO-led governance with human accountability.

OpenAI published a customer story describing Gilbert + Tobin's adoption of ChatGPT Enterprise and Codex across the law firm. The firm pairs executive-level commitment with formal governance and human accountability to expand AI use in legal workflows. The piece is a promotional case study, with no new product capabilities or research announced.

OpenAI News·Sep 1, 01:00 UTC · 15d agoAI industry1

OpenClaw went viral. Meet the maintainers building and securing it.

GitHub profiles OpenClaw, its fastest-growing project ever, as maintainers including Peter Steinberger discuss building and securing it.

The GitHub Blog profiled OpenClaw, described as the fastest-growing project in GitHub history, roughly six months after it went viral. Maintainers including Peter Steinberger discuss lessons learned while building and securing the project during rapid growth. The piece focuses on open-source maintenance and security practices for a widely adopted project.

GitHub Blog · Security·Aug 27, 16:00 UTC · 19d agoIndustry2

Switzerland's Federal Government Is Replacing Microsoft on 3k Computers

Switzerland's Federal Chancellery launched a pilot replacing Microsoft 365 with open-source openDesk on 3,000 federal workstations by end of 2027.

Switzerland launched a CHF 9 million pilot to migrate 3,000 federal workstations (about 7% of the federal workforce) from Microsoft 365 to the German open-source openDesk suite, targeting completion by end of 2027. The move follows a successful 172-employee proof of concept (PoC BOSS) and the 2024 EMBAG open-source law, driven by digital sovereignty concerns about foreign access to Swiss government data. The Swiss Army's Cyber Command plans a faster migration, replacing Microsoft 365 with openDesk by October 2026, while Microsoft is investing over CHF 325 million in Swiss AI and cloud infrastructure.

Hacker News · security·Sep 7, 05:33 UTC · 9d agoPolicy & legalHN 354↑ · 278 comments

From assistance to execution: How enterprises put AI to work

OpenAI reports enterprise adoption patterns of agentic AI through ChatGPT and Codex, with frontier firms pulling ahead in deployment.

OpenAI published a report on how enterprises are moving from AI assistance to autonomous execution, focusing on agentic AI deployments. It highlights the use of ChatGPT and Codex in enterprise workflows and argues that frontier firms are pulling ahead of peers in AI adoption. The piece is adoption research and marketing rather than a security disclosure.

OpenAI News·Aug 12, 06:00 UTC · Aug 12, 2026AI industry1

OpenClaw 2.0 pours glitter on slow-burning security dumpster fire

The Register critiques OpenClaw 2.0 for easing installation and revamping the interface while leaving most agent security decisions to users.

The Register reports that OpenClaw 2.0, a popular agent harness, makes installation easier and adds a new interface wrapper. However, the release leaves most security decisions to users, which the outlet argues could worsen the risk posture of a widely deployed tool. The piece frames the update as cosmetic improvement over a slow-burning security problem.

The Register · Security·Aug 31, 19:13 UTC · 15d agoAI tools & infra

The builder’s guide to GPT‑5.6

OpenAI publishes a builder's guide showing startups how to use GPT-5.6 and updated Responses API features to build cost-efficient AI agents.

OpenAI released a guide aimed at developers and startups building on GPT-5.6. It covers smarter model selection and new Responses API capabilities intended to make AI agents faster and more cost-efficient to run. The piece is promotional developer guidance rather than a research or security announcement.

OpenAI News·Aug 13, 11:00 UTC · Aug 13, 2026AI industry

Researchers open-source a Wi-Fi cyber range for security training

NTNU and Aegean researchers open-source a software-emulated Wi-Fi cyber range using mac80211_hwsim with LLM-assisted scenario building.

Researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and the University of the Aegean published a design and prototype for a cyber range dedicated to IEEE 802.11 security training, emulating access points and clients with mac80211_hwsim, Linux namespaces, hostapd, wpa_supplicant, dnsmasq, and FreeRADIUS. The platform bundles Aircrack-ng, Wireshark, and custom tools WPAxFuzz and Bl0ck, and can convert plain-language scenario descriptions into deployable definitions via a locally hosted Llama model. A working prototype covering scenario creation and deployment is on GitHub; monitoring, access control, and orchestration zones remain future work.

Help Net Security·Aug 24, 04:21 UTC · 23d agoTools1

Open-source secrets scanning tool Sift hunts credentials in Microsoft 365, Slack, and Jira

Stratus Security open-sourced Sift, a CLI secrets scanner covering Active Directory, SharePoint, Teams, Slack, Jira, and Confluence, outperforming Snaffler in benchmarks.

Stratus Security released Sift, a free open-source command line tool that hunts passwords, API keys, and sensitive data across local disks, Windows shares, Active Directory, SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, Slack, Jira, and Confluence. In the firm's benchmarks, Sift scanned 250,000 files in 10.61 seconds versus Snaffler's 25.48 and averaged 92 MiB memory versus Snaffler's 337 MiB. Optional false-positive filtering runs through a local language model via Ollama, and scans write checkpoints so interrupted runs resume. The tool found thousands of credentials in Jira ticket comments that prior pentesting had missed.

Help Net Security·Sep 2, 00:00 UTC · 14d agoTools

This Key Will Self-Destruct: An Open Standard for Revocable API Keys

SecurityWeek opinion piece proposes ORKS, an open standard adding issuer prefixes, discovery files, and unauthenticated revocation endpoints to make leaked API keys quickly revocable.

The article argues that plain API keys leak frequently yet lack any standardized revocation mechanism, unlike OAuth tokens which gained RFC 7009 revocation in 2013, and that GitHub's Secret Scanning Partner Program solves this only in a proprietary, invite-only way. The author proposes ORKS (Open Revocable Key Standard), with a draft spec on GitHub, built on four parts: keys embedding their issuer domain in a fixed prefix format, a discoverable /.well-known/api-key-config JSON file, unauthenticated revocation by possession of the full key, and declared constraints such as IP allowlists, expiry, scopes, and mTLS. An optional quarantine mode inspired by Toyota's andon cord restricts a reported key to read-only and throttled operation for a default 24-hour window before automatic revocation. The piece frames AI agents as making this urgent, since agents hold many credentials, can exfiltrate them via prompt injection, and can leak secrets into logs at machine speed.

SecurityWeek·Sep 9, 10:00 UTC · 6d agoTools1

Chainloop: Open-source evidence store and policy engine for the software supply chain

Help Net Security·Aug 10, 00:00 UTC · Aug 10, 2026Policy & legal

1Password increases engineering productivity 21% with Codex

OpenAI reports 1Password engineers boosted productivity 21% using Codex to build features and internal tools under strict security policies.

OpenAI published a customer case study stating that 1Password's engineering teams use Codex to rapidly develop new features and internal tools while reaching production readiness. The company attributes a 21% engineering productivity increase to the adoption, noting rigorous security policies were maintained throughout.

OpenAI News·Sep 8, 00:00 UTC · 8d agoAI industry

[Control Systems] National Instruments security advisory (AV26-856)

Canada's Cyber Centre relayed National Instruments advisories for memory corruption, out-of-bounds read, and out-of-bounds write flaws in LabVIEW versions.

The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security published control systems advisory AV26-856 covering National Instruments LabVIEW. Affected versions include releases before 23.0.0, 23.3.10, 24.3.7, 25.3.5, and 26.3.1. The flaws include memory corruption, an integer conversion out-of-bounds read, and an integer overflow out-of-bounds write. Users and administrators are urged to review the links and apply NI security updates.

Canadian Centre for Cyber Security·Aug 28, 12:16 UTC · 18d agoAdvisory

Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX

OpenAI is winding down its contract supplying models to Cursor after Cursor's acquisition by SpaceX.

OpenAI announced it will wind down the contract that provides OpenAI models to the Cursor coding tool. The decision follows Cursor's acquisition by SpaceX. Developers relying on OpenAI models inside Cursor will need alternatives as the contract ends.

OpenAI News·Aug 28, 06:00 UTC · 19d agoAI industry

Dr. Claw: An AI Scientist Workspace for Vibe Research

Researchers release Dr. Claw, an open-source auditable workspace that wraps coding agents like Claude Code for end-to-end AI-assisted research workflows.

Paper 2609.00365 presents Dr. Claw, an open-source workspace that wraps existing coding-agent executors such as Claude Code and Gemini CLI in a controllable, human-in-the-loop research workflow. It uses persistent state objects, a reusable skill library, and multi-executor coordination to make research decisions auditable and recoverable, rather than adding another autonomous agent. Holding the executor fixed, Dr. Claw scores higher on research completeness than a bare command-line agent while preserving an auditable process trail. The code is released under AGPL-3.0 on GitHub (OpenLAIR/dr-claw).

Hugging Face daily papers·Aug 30, 20:00 UTC · 16d agoAI research