Build your own security agents

Open-source framework for security agents with live, read-only access to your infrastructure.

Quickstart · Built-in agents · Your first agent · Docs

Ask your infrastructure anything. Cynative runs frontier models across your code, cloud and runtime - reasoning through GitHub, GitLab, AWS, GCP, Azure and Kubernetes as one system - and comes back with verified answers.

cynative "what in my cloud is publicly exposed that shouldn't be?"

45 built-in agents for AWS, GCP, Azure, GitHub and Kubernetes - privilege escalation, public exposure, supply chain, detection coverage and more - or you write your own in one markdown file.

One question fans out across your whole stack: Cynative writes and runs code in an ephemeral sandbox, querying your APIs in parallel. Every finding is cross-checked and traced back to its origin.

Unlike coding agents and MCP servers, it's read-only by construction: every call is gated and authorized before a credential is attached - point it at production with confidence.

What your agents get

• Code-to-runtime: Reasons through AWS, GCP, Azure, any K8s, GitHub and GitLab
• Sandbox: Generates and runs code to research at scale, with no network or host access of its own
• Action-gate: Resolves every call to its required IAM actions and applies a read-only policy before a credential is attached
• Evidence-backed: Cross-checks to verify every finding
• Sovereign: One binary, your model, your data stays yours

Quickstart

Install and set an LLM:

brew install cynative/tap/cynative

export CYNATIVE_LLM_PROVIDER=anthropic
export CYNATIVE_LLM_MODEL=claude-opus-5
export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=...

It picks up the credentials already in your shell. Run a built-in agent:

cynative -p --agent aws-network-exposure

Or ask it anything:

cynative -p "which IAM roles can escalate to admin?"
cynative -p "high-risk cloud permissions, trace each to the PR where it was granted"
cynative -p "cloud credentials leaked in source code and their current blast radius"
cynative "live cloud resources absent from IaC - drift" # starts an interactive session
cat findings.json | cynative -p "triage these findings by exploitability"

Built-in agents

45 agents are embedded in the binary. Each one is a reviewed prompt for a specific question.

	Agents	For example
AWS	20	aws-privilege-escalation, aws-public-storage, aws-unpatched-workloads, aws-supply-chain
Azure	11	azure-keyvault-exposure, azure-storage-exposure, azure-privilege-escalation
GCP	5	gcp-public-bindings, gcp-static-credentials, gcp-inference-exposure
GitHub	4	github-workflow-trust, github-unpatched-dependencies, github-branch-protection
Kubernetes	5	k8s-pod-privilege, k8s-self-managed-apiserver-access

cynative agents list            # every agent, with its description
cynative agents show <name>     # the exact prompt that would run

The full catalog with a one-line description of each agent is in docs/agents-catalog.md.

Your first agent

cynative agents show <name> prints the exact file an agent would run. To make your own version, copy it to your agents directory under a new name and edit it:

mkdir -p ~/.cynative/agents

cynative agents show aws-public-datastores > ~/.cynative/agents/my-aws-public-datastores.md
# edit ~/.cynative/agents/my-aws-public-datastores.md, then:
cynative -p --agent my-aws-public-datastores

An agent is a markdown file: strict YAML frontmatter whose only key is description, then the prompt body. The filename is the name. A file in ~/.cynative/agents/ wins over a built-in of the same name, so give your copy a distinct name to keep both. See docs/agents.md for the format.

Running agents

cynative -p --agent aws-public-datastores "AWS account 128149835728 only"   # with a task
cynative -p --agent aws-public-datastores                    # without
cynative --agent aws-public-datastores                       # seeds an interactive session

--agent composes with -p, --auto-approve, --config and piped stdin, so the same file runs interactively while you develop it and non-interactively once it settles.

Agents are read from ~/.cynative/agents/ and from the set built into the binary; a user file wins over a built-in of the same name. cynative agents list shows every agent with its source and marks the shadowed copies, and cynative agents show <name> prints the exact file that would run.

Can't a coding agent with MCPs do this?

	Coding agent + MCPs	Cynative
Throughput	One action per call	Writes sandboxed code that fans out calls concurrently - fewer tokens, faster answers
Findings	Unverified output	Verifier cross-checks every finding against live evidence
Read-only	Opt-in read filter	On by default, fails closed - required IAM actions checked against a security-audit policy. secretsmanager:GetSecretValue is an IAM Read: a filter allows it, SecurityAudit blocks it
Credentials	Ambient, unchanged	STS session scoped to read-only - AWS enforces the boundary too
Blast radius	Your shell, any network	Research code runs in a sandbox with no host access, network pinned to your mapped services
Secrets	Sent to the model as-is	Redacted from tool output before it's sent to the model
Supply chain	Third-party MCPs and skills running with your creds	One open-source binary, connectors built in
Audit trail	Scattered session logs, best effort	Fail-closed JSONL log of every tool call - if it can't record, it aborts

One binary, your model endpoint, your account. Run it on an instance in the cloud it audits, through that cloud's managed inference, and nothing leaves your environment: security on your infrastructure, from within your infrastructure.

Installation

Homebrew (macOS / Linux - recommended):

brew install cynative/tap/cynative

Install script (macOS / Linux - verifies the download's SHA-256 against the release checksums.txt, failing closed):

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cynative/cynative/main/install.sh | sh

Windows (Scoop):

scoop bucket add cynative https://github.com/cynative/scoop-bucket
scoop install cynative

Updating, uninstalling, Windows details, version pinning & manual download

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