Rod

An operator workbench for authorized red-team operations and adversarial security testing.
Plan engagements, govern offensive workflows, coordinate execution, and turn evidence into findings.

Vision | Architecture | Roadmap | Security | Contributing

Important

Rod is an early implementation foundation. The API and operator shell run locally, but assessment workflows, persistence, authentication, execution, and target interaction are not implemented. Rod is not production-ready or security-certified.

Purpose

Rod is designed for red teams and security practitioners conducting explicitly authorized offensive security work. It brings engagement scope, asset intelligence, operation planning, approvals, execution coordination, governed sessions, findings, evidence, and reporting into one operator workspace.

An Engagement is the primary authorization and isolation boundary. Target-facing work must also pass a ScopePolicy decision and remain constrained by risk classification, approvals, rate and concurrency budgets, cancellation, audit, and a kill switch.

Rod exposes capabilities through reviewable, purpose-specific workflows instead of treating a generic command channel as universal authority.

Current foundation

Area	Available today
Control plane	Runnable .NET 10 ASP.NET Core API with a versioned root and health endpoints
Operator UI	React and TypeScript workstation shell with a local API proxy
Contracts	Architecture, domain, security, protocol, module, and threat-model documentation
Quality	Architecture and API integration tests for the executable foundation
Target execution	Not implemented; no scanner, module runner, managed node, or relay is active

The roadmap defines the evidence required before each capability can advance.

Safety boundary

Rod is for systems whose owners have explicitly authorized assessment. It does not accept capabilities whose primary purpose is stealth persistence, defense evasion, credential theft, keylogging, silent surveillance, unauthorized payload delivery, or indiscriminate scanning of public infrastructure.

High-risk concepts remain guarded contracts, fakes, simulators, or local fixtures until governance, isolation, denial behavior, and recovery are separately reviewed and tested. See the security policy, security model, and threat model.

Architecture direction

Rod starts as a solo-maintainable modular monolith. Business modules own their domain rules and persistence boundaries; cross-module collaboration uses explicit contracts and stable identifiers.

flowchart LR
    UI["React operator workstation"] --> API["ASP.NET Core control plane"]
    API --> Data["PostgreSQL and outbox (planned)"]
    API --> Evidence["S3 evidence store (planned)"]
    API --> Gateway["gRPC southbound gateway (planned)"]
    Gateway --> Runner["Isolated .NET Runner (planned)"]

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The planned platform uses EF Core with PostgreSQL, S3-compatible evidence storage, REST/OpenAPI northbound contracts, versioned Protobuf/gRPC southbound contracts, OCI-isolated modules, a transactional outbox, and OpenTelemetry. Read the architecture and ADR index for the durable decisions.

Start locally

Prerequisites:

• .NET SDK 10.0.110, selected by global.json;
• Node.js 24.x and npm 11.16.0.

Restore, build, and test the control-plane foundation:

dotnet restore
dotnet build --no-restore
dotnet test --no-build

Install and validate the operator workstation:

npm ci --prefix src/Web
npm run lint --prefix src/Web
npm run build --prefix src/Web

Run the API and web development servers in separate terminals:

dotnet run --project src/Rod.Api --launch-profile https
npm run dev --prefix src/Web

Open http://localhost:5173. The development proxy connects to the API at https://localhost:7256.

Repository guide

Path	Purpose
src/Rod.Api	ASP.NET Core host and public HTTP boundary
src/Rod.Bootstrap	Application composition and shared hosting setup
src/Web	React operator workstation
tests/Architecture	Enforced dependency rules
tests/Integration	Executable API behavior
docs	Product, architecture, safety, and protocol decisions

Changes should be small, reviewable vertical slices with focused tests and honest validation results. Start with CONTRIBUTING.md before proposing a change. Report suspected vulnerabilities through the private process described in SECURITY.md, not through a public issue.

License

Rod is licensed under the MIT License.