Mantishack
stalk - wait - strike - hold
Ethically hack and discover vulnerabilities in any software with the power of AI.
mantishack.com
What is Mantishack?
Mantishack is Mantis AI: an autonomous vulnerability-discovery agent built on top of OpenAI's Codex CLI (Rust, Apache-2.0), rebranded and wired end-to-end as an offensive-AppSec harness. It runs a staged detect-then-validate pipeline over a codebase - recon, detect, reachability, attacker-simulation validation, chaining, gated exploitation, fixing, and reporting - with every finding owned by a tool, not tracked in prose.
The core bet is the same one this project has always made: detection is commodity, validation precision is the product. What survives attacker-simulation is real; everything else gets rejected with a cited roadblock.
It is not polished software. It is a working harness with real gaps (see "Project history" and MANTIS.md for what's wired vs. what still needs external binaries or a running target), usable in the field, rough in the corners.
Quick start
Build from source
# Clone the repo
git clone https://github.com/deonmenezes/mantishack.git
cd mantishack
# Build the CLI (Rust toolchain required, see codex-rs/rust-toolchain.toml)
cd codex-rs
cargo build --release -p codex-cli
# Run it from the repo root so the project-scoped .codex/config.toml resolves
cd ..
./codex-rs/target/release/codex
Install the capability-catalog binaries
The MCP tool servers under .codex/mcp-servers/ are pure Node.js and need no install of their own, but the scanners they wrap degrade to available: false until you install the underlying binaries:
pip install semgrep bandit
brew install trufflehog trivy z3 ast-grep # or your platform's equivalent
go install github.com/google/osv-scanner/v2/cmd/osv-scanner@latest
# CodeQL CLI: https://github.com/github/codeql-cli-binaries
Nothing is fabricated when a binary is missing - each server reports plainly that the tool isn't installed rather than inventing findings.
What's wired
| Layer | Where | What it does |
|---|
| Capability servers (MCP) | .codex/mcp-servers/ | semgrep_scan, codeql_create_database/codeql_analyze, osv_scan, trufflehog_scan, bandit_scan, trivy_scan - SAST/SCA/secrets, all report-until-installed. |
| Program-analysis substrate | .codex/mcp-servers/program-analysis/ | source_sink_scan (heuristic, works now), ast_grep_scan (structural search), smt_check_reachability (z3-backed path-condition satisfiability). |
| Findings spine | .codex/mcp-servers/findings/ | Tool-owned finding state: finding_create/update/get/list. Enforces "no proof -> no confirm" and "reject cites a roadblock" in code, not prose. Works now, zero deps. |
| Evidence | .codex/mcp-servers/http-audit/ | Turns a captured HTTP exchange into a bounded, redacted evidence pack with a stable request-ref hash. Works now, zero deps. |
| Injection defense | .codex/mcp-servers/canary/ | Decoy tools that alert if called - a tripwire for prompt injection or hallucinated tool use. Works now, zero deps. |
| Agent catalog | .codex/agents/*.toml | The full pipeline as spawn_agent roles: recon, context-enrich, detector, reachability, validator, verifier-balanced/brutalist/final, chain-builder, exploiter (gated), fixer, reporter, orchestrator. |
| Knowledge | .codex/skills/*/SKILL.md | Playbooks tying each tool/agent into the findings lifecycle: mantis-pipeline (master playbook), semgrep-triage, codeql-audit, osv-dependency-scan, secrets-scan, detection-breadth, program-analysis, , , . |
See MANTIS.md for the full map, the "how to extend" recipes, and the prioritized roadmap of what's next (recon/DAST toolchain, injection confirmers, OOB, fuzzing, CVE intel - each a report-until-installed MCP server on the existing pattern).
How the pipeline works
Findings move through one lifecycle, owned by the findings service, never hand-edited in prose:
candidate -> confirmed | rejected -> exploited -> fixed -> verified
- Detect is generous. SAST/SCA/secrets scanners plus LLM reasoning surface
candidates at high recall. Do not self-censor false positives here - that's Validate's job.
- Validate is ruthless. Attacker-simulation reasons as an attacker with attacker-only capabilities: is the pattern real or noise, what does an attacker need to reach it, does the path actually exist, can it be reached from outside. A candidate only becomes
confirmed with reachability evidence attached - the findings service refuses the transition otherwise. A rejected candidate must cite the specific roadblock (auth gate, sanitizer at the sink, provably-unreachable path, self-only harm) - "seems safe" isn't accepted.
- Chain, exploit, fix, verify follow only for confirmed findings, with exploitation double-gated and off by default.
Establish scope and authorization first. Work only on targets you own or are explicitly authorized to test. If authorization for active/exploit testing is unclear, restrict the run to read-only static analysis until scope is established.
Z3 SMT integration
The program-analysis MCP server wraps z3 for reachability (smt_check_reachability): construct the path condition for a candidate source-to-sink flow as an SMT-LIB2 script, hand it to the tool, and get back sat (an attacker-controlled assignment reaches the sink - proceed to Validate), unsat (provably unreachable - reject, citing the unsat result as the roadblock), or unknown (proves nothing either way). It degrades to available: false if z3 isn't installed, same as every other scanner server.
Using a different model
Mantis AI inherits Codex CLI's provider-agnostic model routing - configure providers, API keys, and per-model settings the same way you would for upstream Codex CLI (see codex-rs/config.md and codex-rs/model-provider/). There's no separate "orchestration vs. analysis" split: one model runs the harness loop, calling the MCP tools and (when multi-agent mode is enabled) spawning the role agents in .codex/agents/.
Architecture
The invariant that governs everything (also documented in MANTIS.md):
- Tool = code - an MCP server handler that does something. Wired in
.codex/config.toml [mcp_servers.*], implemented under .codex/mcp-servers/<name>/server.js.
- Agent = prompt - a system prompt + model tier + tool/permission policy. A TOML role file under
.codex/agents/<name>.toml, auto-discovered and offered as a spawn_agent agent type.
- Skill = knowledge - reference text the model reads.
.codex/skills/<name>/SKILL.md.
The harness (Codex CLI, Rust - codex-rs/) runs the loop; it does zero security by itself. All actual security logic lives in the capability layer, the agent prompts, and the skills.
codex-rs/ the Codex CLI harness (sessions, sandboxing, TUI, MCP client)
.codex/config.toml project-scoped MCP server registration
.codex/mcp-servers/ capability layer (the tools)
.codex/agents/ role catalog (the agents)
.codex/skills/ playbooks (the knowledge)
.codex/MANTIS.md map of what's wired + how to extend it
Licence
Apache-2.0, dual-copyright:
- Upstream framework code (OpenAI Codex CLI) - see
LICENSE for the full copyright notice.
- Mantishack/Mantis AI modifications (identity rebrand, capability layer, agent/skill catalog, TUI mascot + theme, README/NOTICE) - Copyright (c) 2026 Deon Menezes. See
LICENSE-MANTISHACK.
Both files' terms sit alongside each other; neither supersedes the other. See NOTICE for combined attribution. Review the licences for all invoked components before commercial use - CodeQL in particular does not permit commercial use.
Mantishack issues: https://github.com/deonmenezes/mantishack/issues
Project history
Earlier mantishack versions ran as an independent Rust daemon + MCP agent stack and drew from many open-source projects; that architecture was retired. The codebase that followed was a full rebrand of an upstream MIT framework, RAPTOR by Gadi Evron, Daniel Cuthbert, Thomas Dullien (Halvar Flake), Michael Bargury, and John Cartwright - built on Claude Code, adding an auth + logging audit lane, /mantis-* slash commands, and the mascot/branding you still see above.
That RAPTOR-derived codebase has now also been retired and replaced with the architecture described in this README: OpenAI's Codex CLI (Rust, Apache-2.0) as the harness, rebranded to Mantis AI, with the capability/agent/skill layers described above under "What's wired". None of RAPTOR's code ships in this tree today - see LICENSE, LICENSE-MANTISHACK, and NOTICE for the current licensing, and CITATION.cff for RAPTOR's original citation, preserved for the historical record. We credit RAPTOR's authors here in good faith for the work that shaped what mantishack used to be.
Acknowledgements
Current architecture:
Historical (retired RAPTOR-era stack): the previous version of this README credited a much longer list of tools and ecosystems (ProjectDiscovery's recon suite, jwt_tool, gobuster, Patchright, Bearer, Trivy, trufflehog, hashcat, Hydra, the Rust async/crypto ecosystem, a Vite/React/Supabase dashboard, and more) that shaped the RAPTOR-derived codebase this repository used to ship. None of that code is present today; the full historical acknowledgement list is preserved in this repository's git history for the record.
If we drew from a project that isn't credited here, please open an issue - we want this list to reflect reality.
