nyx/CHANGELOG.md

Changelog

All notable changes to Nyx are documented here. The format is based on Keep a Changelog and the project follows Semantic Versioning. For where Nyx is going, see the Roadmap.

[Unreleased]

No changes yet.

[0.5.0] - 2026-04-29

The biggest release since launch. The taint engine was rebuilt on top of an SSA IR, cross-file analysis was deepened across the board, and Nyx now ships a local web UI for triaging findings without leaving your machine.

Heads-up: false positives or regressions on cross-file flows are possible. Please open an issue with a minimal reproduction if you hit one.

Highlights

• New SSA-based taint engine. Block-level worklist analysis over a pruned SSA IR, replacing the legacy BFS engine across all 10 languages. More precise, easier to extend, and the foundation for everything else in this release.
• Cross-file analysis. Function summaries (including the new SSA summaries) flow across files via SQLite-backed persistence. Callee bodies can be inlined for context-sensitive analysis (k=1) and walked symbolically across file boundaries.
• Symbolic execution layer. Candidate findings are walked symbolically from source to sink, producing concrete attack witnesses, pruning infeasible paths, and (optionally) handing constraints off to Z3.
• Local web UI (nyx serve). React + Vite frontend for browsing findings, viewing flow paths, and triaging results. Triage decisions persist to .nyx/triage.json so they version with your code.
• Hostile-repo hardening. Path containment, loopback-only serving, CSRF tokens, bounded artifact reads. Safe to run on untrusted code.
• Tighter false-positive controls. Type-aware sink suppression, abstract interpretation (intervals + string prefixes), constraint solving, allowlist and type-check guard recognition, and confidence scoring on every finding.

Engine

• SSA IR with dominance-frontier phi insertion. The optimization pipeline runs constant propagation, branch pruning, copy propagation, alias analysis, DCE, type facts, and points-to in sequence.
• Multi-label classification. A single API can carry both Source and Sink labels (e.g. PHP file_get_contents, Java readObject).
• Gated sinks. setAttribute, parseFromString, etc. only activate when the constant attribute argument is dangerous, and only the payload argument is treated as taint-bearing.
• Container taint with per-index precision and bounded points-to. Aliased containers share heap identity correctly.
• Loop-aware analysis: induction-variable pruning, widening at loop heads, bounded unrolling in symex.
• Path-sensitive phi evaluation propagates validation when all tainted predecessors are guarded.
• Per-return-path summaries decompose function effects when paths produce different taint behavior.
• Cross-file SCC fixed-point. Mutually recursive functions across files now reach a joint convergence.
• Demand-driven backwards analysis (off by default) annotates findings with cutoff diagnostics.
• Direction-aware engine notes (UnderReport, OverReport, Bail) flow into confidence scoring, ranking, and the new --require-converged strict mode.

Symbolic Execution

• Expression trees (SymbolicValue) preserve computation structure through the path walk: integers, strings, binary ops, concatenations, calls, phi merges.
• Witness strings reconstruct concrete attack payloads at sink nodes.
• Bounded multi-path forking with reachability pruning.
• Cross-file: callee summaries are modeled directly, and pre-lowered callee bodies are loaded from SQLite so witnesses can keep walking across files.
• Interprocedural mode: nested frames with full state propagation, transitive descent up to 3 levels, structured cutoff tracking.
• Field-sensitive symbolic heap with bounded fields per object.
• Symbolic string theory: Substr, Replace, ToLower, ToUpper, Trim, StrLen modeled with concrete folding and sanitizer pattern detection.
• Optional Z3 integration (compile-time smt feature) for cross-variable constraint solving.

Security & Coverage

• Vulnerability classes added: SSRF (10 languages), deserialization (Python, Ruby, Java, PHP), and Cap::UNAUTHORIZED_ID for auth-as-taint (off by default behind config flag).
• Auth analysis: receiver-type sink gating, row-level ownership-equality detection, self-actor recognition (let user = require_auth()), sink classification (in-memory vs realtime vs outbound), helper-summary lifting, and SQL JOIN-through-ACL recognition.
• State analysis (resource lifecycle, use-after-close, leaks, unauthed access) is now on by default. RAII-aware for Rust and C++; recognizes Python with, Go defer, Java try-with-resources.
• Framework rule packs: Express, Flask/Django, Spring/JNDI, Rails. Per-language label depth significantly expanded.
• C/C++ taint depth: output-parameter source propagation, implicit definitions for uninitialized declarations.
• Negative test corpus (30 fixtures) and a 262-case benchmark with CI gates on rule-level Precision/Recall/F1.

CLI & Output

• nyx serve: local web UI on localhost only (refuses non-loopback binds).
• --require-converged filters out findings where the engine bailed early.
• Analysis-engine toggles graduated from NYX_* env vars to first-class flags and [analysis.engine] config: --constraint-solving, --abstract-interp, --context-sensitive, --symex, --cross-file-symex, --symex-interproc, --smt, --parse-timeout-ms. Old env vars still work when Nyx is consumed as a library.
• Confidence (High/Medium/Low) shown on every finding, including console headers.
• Engine notes surfaced in console ([capped: N notes, over-report]), JSON (engine_notes, confidence_capped), and SARIF (result.properties.loss_direction).
• Flow paths reconstructed step-by-step with file/line/snippet for each hop.
• Concrete attack witness strings synthesized by the symbolic executor.
• Primary sink locations now point at the callee's real sink line; caller call sites are preserved as flow steps.
• Richer scan progress: explicit stages, timing breakdowns, language counters, skipped/reused file counts.
• Tighter taint-finding deduplication.

Hardening

• Centralized path containment rejects traversal, symlink escapes, and oversized reads across UI, debug, and triage routes.
• nyx serve validates Host headers, requires per-session CSRF tokens for mutations, and refuses scans outside the original repo root.
• Walker re-validates symlink targets against the scan root.
• Bounded reads on framework manifests and .nyx/triage.json imports.
• UI falls back to plain text on pathologically long lines to defeat regex-DoS in syntax highlighting.
• Parser timeout is now configuration-backed with hostile-input regression coverage.

Persistence

• SQLite schema bumped to v2. Anonymous-function identity is now a structural DFS index instead of a byte offset, so inserting a line above an unchanged function no longer invalidates its FuncKey. Pre-0.5.0 caches are silently cleared on open; triage data and scan history are preserved.
• Engine-version metadata; persisted summaries and file hashes invalidate on mismatch.
• Stale SSA tables recreate when required columns are missing; deserialization failures log instead of silently dropping rows.

Frontend

• Replaced the legacy app.js with a React + Vite + TypeScript SPA.
• Interactive graph workspace for CFG and call-graph views (Graphology + ELK + Sigma) with neighborhood reduction and a full-page inspector.
• Triage UI with database-backed decisions (true positive, false positive, deferred, suppressed) and .nyx/triage.json round-trip.
• Scan history, rules management, and finding detail panels with evidence and flow visualization.
• Vitest browser-side test suite wired into CI.

Removed

• Legacy BFS taint engine, TaintTransfer, TaintState, and the NYX_LEGACY fallback.
• Legacy vanilla-JS frontend (app.js).

[0.4.0] - 2026-02-25

A precision and ergonomics release. Findings are now ranked, lower-noise by default, and easier to triage in CI.

Highlights

• Attack-surface ranking. Every finding gets an exploitability score combining severity, analysis kind, evidence strength, and path-validation. Console output shows the score in the header line; --no-rank opts out.
• Low-noise prioritization. Quality-category findings are excluded by default (--include-quality brings them back). High-frequency Quality rules are rolled up per (file, rule) with example occurrences. LOW budgets cap noise without ever displacing High/Medium findings.
• State-model dataflow analysis. New per-variable resource-lifecycle and auth-level analysis catches use-after-close, double-close, must-leak, may-leak (branch-aware), and unauthenticated-sink access. Opt-in via scanner.enable_state_analysis.
• Inline nyx:ignore suppressions with same-line and next-line directives, comma lists, wildcard suffixes, and string-literal guards across all 10 languages.
• AST pattern overhaul. All 10 language pattern files rewritten with consistent metadata, namespaced IDs (<lang>.<category>.<specific>), and 30+ new patterns. 11 broken tree-sitter queries fixed.
• Monotone forward-dataflow taint engine. Replaced the BFS engine with a proper worklist over a finite lattice. Termination is now guaranteed by lattice height, eliminating BFS-budget bailouts on large files.
• Path-sensitive taint analysis. Branch predicates flow with the analysis. Contradictory guards prune infeasible paths; validation calls produce annotated findings without changing severity.
• Interprocedural call graph. Whole-program graph with three-valued callee resolution (Resolved/NotFound/Ambiguous), SCC analysis, and topo ordering ready for bottom-up taint propagation.

CLI & Output

• --severity <EXPR> replaces --high-only. Supports HIGH, HIGH,MEDIUM, >=MEDIUM. Filtering is now applied at the output stage so taint and CFG findings are correctly downgraded too.
• --mode <full|ast|cfg|taint> replaces --ast-only and --cfg-only.
• --index <auto|off|rebuild> replaces --no-index and --rebuild-index.
• --fail-on <SEVERITY> for CI exit-code gating.
• --min-score <N> for ranking-aware filtering.
• --show-suppressed reveals suppressed findings dimmed with [SUPPRESSED].
• --keep-nonprod-severity (renamed from --include-nonprod).
• --quiet mirrors output.quiet.
• Console renderer overhauled: severity is the strongest visual anchor, file paths are dim blue, taint flows use → arrows, multi-line call chains are normalized.
• Confidence shown alongside score in the header line.
• Pattern-level confidence is now set at the pattern definition site, not heuristically inferred from severity.

Breaking

• Config and data directory renamed from dev.ecpeter23.nyx to nyx. Existing config and SQLite indexes at the old path won't be picked up. Copy them across or re-run nyx scan.
• Severity::from_str now returns Err for unknown values instead of silently defaulting to Low.

Notable Fixes

• KINDS-map audit across all 10 languages: 89 missing tree-sitter node types added. Switch/case, try/catch/finally, class bodies, lambdas, closures, and namespaces are no longer silently dropped.
• else_clause mapping fixed for C, C++, Rust, JS, TS, Python, PHP. Code inside else blocks was being dropped from the CFG.
• Rust if let / while let taint propagation now works.
• Taint BFS non-termination on large JS files (the BFS engine has since been replaced).
• C++ popen pattern ID collision with C.
• Constant-arg sink suppression for AST patterns.

[0.3.0] - 2026-02-25

Configurability, SARIF, and an aggressive false-positive purge.

Highlights

• Configurable analysis rules. Sources, sanitizers, sinks, terminators, and event handlers can be defined per language in nyx.local or via nyx config add-rule/add-terminator. Config rules take priority over built-in rules.
• nyx config CLI subcommand with show, path, add-rule, add-terminator.
• SARIF 2.1.0 output (-f sarif). Spec-compliant for GitHub Code Scanning, Azure DevOps, and other SARIF consumers.
• SourceKind taint classification. Findings carry an inferred source kind (UserInput, EnvironmentConfig, FileSystem, Database, Unknown) and severity is now derived from it instead of being hardcoded to High.
• Non-prod severity downgrade by default. Findings in tests, vendor, benchmarks, examples, fixtures, build scripts, and *.min.js are downgraded one tier. --include-nonprod restores original severity.
• Resource leak detection for Python, Ruby, PHP, JavaScript, and TypeScript (file handles, sockets, locks, mysqli, curl, fs streams).
• Progress bars and quiet mode. Indicatif-driven progress for discovery, Pass 1, and Pass 2 (auto-hidden in JSON/SARIF/quiet modes).

Performance

• Single fused parse+CFG pass replaces the previous two-parse summary extraction.
• Light-weight dataflow sweep in CFG builder is now O(N) per function instead of O(N²) over the whole file.
• Parallel summary merging via rayon fold/reduce.
• Indexed scans now read and hash each file once instead of up to 4 times.
• SQLite mutex mode relaxed (r2d2 + WAL provides safety without global lock).
• Zero-allocation taint hashing and in-place taint transfer.

Notable Fixes

• One-hop constant-binding suppression: cmd = "git"; subprocess.run([cmd, ...]) no longer flags.
• Exec-path guards (which, resolve_binary, shutil.which) recognized.
• signal.connect / event.connect no longer match Python db-connection acquire patterns.
• threading.Lock() without .acquire() no longer flags as unreleased.
• FileResponse(f) / send_file(f) recognized as ownership transfer.
• el.href no longer matches location.href patterns.
• Constant-only sink calls (subprocess.run(["make","clean"])) suppressed.
• std::cout no longer treated as a sink.
• Break/continue inside loops correctly wires into the loop header/exit, fixing false unreachable-code findings.
• Preprocessor #ifdef/#endif blocks no longer orphan subsequent code in C/C++.
• freopen no longer matches fopen acquire patterns.
• Struct-field, linked-list, and global assignment recognized as ownership transfers.

[0.2.0] - 2026-02-24

The cross-file release.

• Two-pass cross-file taint analysis. Pass 1 extracts FuncSummary per function (caps, propagation, callees), Pass 2 runs BFS taint propagation with cross-file callee resolution.
• CFG analysis engine with five detectors: unguarded sinks, auth gaps in web handlers, unreachable security code, error fallthrough, resource leaks.
• Cross-language interop via explicit InteropEdge structs (no false-positive name collisions).
• Function summaries persisted to SQLite (function_summaries table).
• Multi-language CFG + taint support for all 10 languages.
• Resource leak detection for C/C++, Go, Rust, and Java.
• Finding scoring system combining severity, entry-point proximity, path complexity, taint confirmation, and confidence.
• Analysis modes: Full (default), Ast (--ast-only), Taint (--cfg-only).
• Cap bitflags expanded: ENV_VAR, HTML_ESCAPE, SHELL_ESCAPE, URL_ENCODE, JSON_PARSE, FILE_IO.
• Performance: read-once/hash-once via _from_bytes variants, lock-free rayon, SQLite WAL + 8 MB cache + 256 MB mmap.
• Tracing instrumentation on all pipeline stages; criterion benchmark suite.

[0.2.0-alpha] - 2025-06-28

• Experimental intra-procedural CFG + taint analysis for Rust. Builds a CFG, applies dataflow, and flags unsanitised Source → Sink paths (e.g. env::var → Command::new).
• O(1) node-kind lookup via per-language PHF tables.
• Debug channel target=cfg (RUST_LOG=nyx::cfg=debug) to inspect generated graphs.
• Fixed Windows release pipeline (PowerShell has no zip command).

[0.1.1-alpha] - 2025-06-25

• Fixed scan --no-index not respecting the max_results config setting (#1).
• Integration tests covering indexing and scanning pipelines (#3, #4, #5, #8).

[0.1.0-alpha] - 2025-06-25

Initial alpha release.

• Multi-language AST pattern scanning via tree-sitter for Rust, C/C++, Java, Go, PHP, Python, Ruby, TypeScript, JavaScript.
• scan command: filesystem walker, pattern execution, console output.
• index command: build, rebuild, and status reporting of SQLite-backed index.
• list command: list indexed projects with optional verbosity.
• clean command: remove one or all project indexes.
• Configuration system with nyx.conf (generated) and nyx.local (user overrides).
• Default severity levels: High, Medium, Low.