Cortex

The problem

Knowing what is actually reachable on a network, and what is running on it, is the first step of almost every security and infrastructure decision. Doing that accurately and repeatably, rather than by hand and by guesswork, is harder than it looks.

The system

Reconnaissance and systems tooling built inside Red Sentra. It shares architectural lineage with the internal tooling the team already uses for security delivery, and is now developed as a project in its own right.

My role

Architecture and engineering direction inside the Red Sentra team.

Architecture decisions

1. The service-probe grammar allows patterns Go's regular expressions cannot compile — lookahead, lookbehind, backreferences. Those are recorded as unsupported and skipped, not counted as parse errors. The distinction is worth a separate type. A failure count that quietly folds in patterns the grammar permits but the engine cannot express tells you your parser is broken when it is not, and you spend the afternoon looking in the wrong file.

Where it stands

Pre-release and under active development. The public site is a preview; there is nothing to download yet.