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Received β€” 7 May 2026 ⏭ /r/netsec - Information Security News & Discussion

An AI security auditor that red-teams PRs to find exploits, not just patterns (open-source + Ollama support)

Hey everyone,

I’ve been working on an experiment in AI-driven application security called SentinAI. I’m a backend engineer in fintech, and I spent part of my recent leave trying to explore a simple question:

Most SAST tools are basically metal detectors:
they’re great at catching obvious patterns like unsafe functions or missing headers.

But they struggle with the stuff that actually matters in real systems:

  • IDORs
  • authorization drift
  • multi-tenant isolation issues
  • broken middleware assumptions
  • cross-file logic flaws

Attackers don’t think in patterns.

They think in systems.

So I built something experimental to explore that gap.

🧠 The Architecture (3-Agent Loop)

Instead of a single LLM prompt (which tends to hallucinate easily), SentinAI uses a structured multi-agent flow:

1. The Architect

Maps the system:

  • routes
  • auth boundaries
  • data flows
  • trust assumptions

2. The Adversary πŸ₯·

Tries to break it:

  • generates exploit paths
  • builds step-by-step attack chains
  • simulates real-world abuse scenarios

3. The Guardian πŸ›‘οΈ

Validates everything:

  • checks exploits against actual code context
  • verifies whether attacks are truly possible
  • filters hallucinated or low-confidence outputs

Anything below a confidence threshold (~40%) is dropped.

The goal is not to β€œfind everything.”

It’s to only surface things that are actually exploitable.

πŸ’‘ What surprised me

A few things stood out while building this:

  • Most real vulnerabilities only appear at interaction points between files, not within a single file
  • LLMs are surprisingly good at generating attack paths, but unreliable without a validation layer
  • The hardest problem wasn’t detection β€” it was noise control
  • Without a β€œGuardian” layer, the system becomes mostly hallucinated security reports very quickly

πŸ”’ Privacy / Local-first design

Coming from fintech, sending proprietary code to external APIs is not acceptable.

So SentinAI is built to run:

  • fully local via Ollama
  • or inside a private VPC
  • with no code leaving the environment

🌐 Web3 expansion (experimental)

I expanded it beyond Web2 into smart contract security:

  • Solana: missing signer checks, PDA misuse
  • EVM: reentrancy, tx.origin issues
  • Move: resource lifecycle bugs

Total coverage: ~45 vulnerability patterns.

🚧 Open questions (honest part)

I’m still actively figuring out:

  • how to reduce hallucinated exploit paths at scale
  • whether multi-agent reasoning actually holds up on large, messy codebases
  • where the boundary is between β€œuseful security reasoning” and β€œLLM storytelling”
  • whether this can realistically outperform hybrid static analysis + human review

One thing I’ve already noticed:

That’s still an open problem.

πŸ§ͺ Why I’m sharing this

This started as a β€œleave experiment” and somehow got ~200+ organic npm installs without any promotion.

I cleaned it up and open-sourced it mainly to:

  • get feedback from people deeper in security engineering
  • understand where this approach fails in real-world systems
  • see if β€œAI attacker reasoning” is actually useful in practice

πŸ”— If you want to poke at it

Curious to hear honest thoughts from people here:

  • Where would this completely break in real codebases?
  • Is multi-agent security reasoning actually useful, or just a fancy abstraction over static + LLM prompts?
  • Has anyone tried something similar in production security pipelines?
submitted by /u/itzdeeni
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