The environment for operators who refuse to wing it.
AnNIXion is an offensive security distribution built on NixOS, for red teamers, OSINT work and persona operations.
The tools, the four browser profiles, the proxy rules, the firewall policy, the menu, the keyboard shortcuts and the wallpaper are all declared in files in this repository. That is the whole system. There is no other state, nothing configured by hand at 2am that only you remember, and no drift between the box you built in March and the one you build today.
Annexion — to take full control of a territory, absorb it completely, make it yours.
The barrier is real and worth stating plainly. On NixOS you do not install
software, you declare it; a package that is not written down is not on the
machine, and no amount of apt install will change that. The first week is
spent learning where things go. People bounce off it.
What is on the other side of that wall:
| What you get | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Nothing drifts | The config is the system. A box six months old and one built this morning from the same commit are the same box. |
| Rollback is a reboot | A change that breaks the desktop is undone by booting the previous generation. Nothing to uninstall, nothing to repair. |
| Your setup is portable | New laptop, fresh VM, rebuilt after an engagement: one clone and one command. |
| You can answer "what is on it" | Every release ships a bill of materials. You will be asked this eventually. |
flowchart LR
R["one repository<br/>flake.nix · system/ · home/ · catalog/"]
R --> L["your laptop"]
R --> V["engagement VM"]
R --> B["the box you rebuilt<br/>after the last job"]
L --- N["identical, down to the shell prompt"]
V --- N
B --- N
style R fill:#1A1D24,stroke:#FF0033,stroke-width:2px,color:#DFE4EA
style N fill:#0E0F13,stroke:#2E323D,color:#7A8494
style L fill:#1A1D24,stroke:#2E323D,color:#DFE4EA
style V fill:#1A1D24,stroke:#2E323D,color:#DFE4EA
style B fill:#1A1D24,stroke:#2E323D,color:#DFE4EA
AnNIXion is that climb already made for offensive security. The tooling, the browser isolation, the egress rules and the desktop are configured and working the first time you boot it. What you add after that is yours.
A VPN that drops mid-engagement is not an inconvenience. The usual answers are weak in specific ways: a proxy set in browser preferences does not cover WebRTC or OCSP, and a killswitch in a VPN client is machine-wide, which is useless when one browser must reach the client's LAN and another must never touch it.
So the enforcement is a cgroup and an nftables rule, and the browser is not consulted:
flowchart TD
O["Firefox — OSINT"] --> S
P["Firefox — Puppet Master"] --> S
S["annixion-vpn.slice<br/>a persistent systemd cgroup"]
S -->|every packet, matched on cgroup| N{"nftables rule<br/>is a tunnel live?"}
N -->|yes| T["out through tun0"]
N -->|no| D["DROP<br/>no fallback, no leak"]
style O fill:#1A1D24,stroke:#2E323D,color:#DFE4EA
style P fill:#1A1D24,stroke:#2E323D,color:#DFE4EA
style S fill:#1A1D24,stroke:#DFE4EA,color:#DFE4EA
style N fill:#0E0F13,stroke:#FFD000,color:#DFE4EA
style T fill:#0E0F13,stroke:#33E62B,color:#33E62B
style D fill:#301212,stroke:#FF0033,stroke-width:2px,color:#FF0033
WebRTC, OCSP, captive-portal probes and anything else the browser does without telling you are all covered, because none of it can leave the cgroup. When the tunnel dies, traffic stops rather than quietly continuing from your real address.
Red Team is deliberately not confined — it has to reach the LAN as often as the internet — but it still fails closed on Burp, and one command puts it in the tunnel when the engagement calls for it.
Not four windows, and not four container tabs. Four profiles, each with its own cookies, cache, extensions, search engines and route out of the machine.
| Profile | Route out | Built for |
|---|---|---|
| Red Team | Burp at 127.0.0.1:8080, fails closed |
Web assessment, interception |
| OSINT | VPN tunnel, kernel-enforced | Investigation, NoScript, canvas and UA control |
| Puppet Master | VPN tunnel, kernel-enforced | Personas, multi-account containers, per-container stripe |
| Unsafe Browser | Direct, no proxy | Captive portals, and nothing else |
Burp's CA is fetched and installed through Firefox enterprise policy on first run, so interception works immediately instead of after the usual certificate dance.
Ninety binaries under a single "Security" folder is not a menu, it is a list. This one is the kill chain:
AnNIXion
├── 01. Reconnaissance
│ ├── Passive OSINT theHarvester · Whois · dig · SecLists
│ ├── Active Scanning Nmap · WhatWeb · Gobuster · ffuf
│ └── RF / Signal Intel HackRF · Gqrx · GNU Radio
├── 02. Weaponization Ghidra · Binwalk
├── 03. Delivery Burp Suite · sqlmap
├── 04. Exploitation
│ ├── Frameworks Metasploit
│ ├── Credential Attacks Hydra · John the Ripper · Hashcat
│ └── Wireless Aircrack-ng
├── 05. Installation Netcat
├── 06. C2 Metasploit
├── 07. Post-Exploitation Impacket
├── 08. Forensics Volatility 3 · Autopsy
├── 09. Reverse Engineering Ghidra · Binwalk
└── 10. Sniffing & Analysis Wireshark · Netcat
Every icon is drawn for this system rather than pulled from a pack, and the colour of a mark tells you what running that tool does to a target — green for passive, amber for probing, red for offensive, blue for forensic. You can read the menu without reading the labels.
The menu is not maintained by hand. A tool is one file, and the package list, the desktop entry, the menu tree and the icon are all derived from it:
flowchart LR
F["catalog/recon/scanning/nmap.nix<br/>package · name · exec · mark"]
F --> P["installed on the system"]
F --> D["its entry in the menu"]
F --> M["its icon in the theme"]
F --> C["filed under Active Scanning<br/>from the folder it sits in"]
style F fill:#1A1D24,stroke:#FF0033,stroke-width:2px,color:#DFE4EA
style P fill:#0E0F13,stroke:#2E323D,color:#DFE4EA
style D fill:#0E0F13,stroke:#2E323D,color:#DFE4EA
style M fill:#0E0F13,stroke:#2E323D,color:#DFE4EA
style C fill:#0E0F13,stroke:#2E323D,color:#7A8494
Adding a tool is adding that one file. Nothing registers it anywhere, so a tool cannot end up installed but missing from the menu, or drawn but never shipped.
Most distributions ask you to trust them. Every AnNIXion release publishes what is actually inside it:
- a CycloneDX SBOM of the installed closure — every package and version on a running machine
- a second covering the build closure — the toolchains, sources and patches that produced it
- a readable page rendering both
SHA256SUMSover all of it and the ISO
The two closures are published and counted separately on purpose. A CVE against a compiler that built the image is not running on your machine, is not reachable by an attacker, and treating it as exposure turns a security document into noise.
Point your own scanner at the first one — grype sbom:annixion-<version>.cdx.json.
None of this is a verdict. It is the material for you to reach one.
A weekly scan republishes the current state, so you can also just look:
| Page | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Known CVEs | What is reported against the shipped system now, and what has no upstream fix |
| Packages | Every package on a running machine, with versions |
| Applications | The tools this distribution chose to ship, and where they stand |
A pull request that pulls in a new dependency with a known CVE is told so on the pull request, scoped to what that branch adds rather than re-reporting the whole closure.
KDE Plasma 6 on X11 with Krohnkite tiling. Hyper-V Enhanced Session over vsock,
so it is usable as a guest rather than merely bootable. ZSH with oh-my-posh, fzf
history and syntax highlighting. Docker runs rootless, as you, with no docker
group — that group is root by another name.
Attack surface reduction is on by default: OpenSSH, ModemManager, geoclue, fwupd and the KDE PIM stack are gone, the firewall has no open ports, and a set of kernel sysctls is applied. All of it at priority 900, so any single piece is restored with one line.
Every option in the base config ships as a default, which means anything you put
in user/ wins without lib.mkForce and without editing a tracked file:
# user/configuration.nix
networking.hostName = "raven";
time.timeZone = "America/New_York";
environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [ tcpdump ];Hostname, git identity, extra packages, keyboard shortcuts, or switching parts
of the hardening back on. user/ is yours; upstream never touches it.
From the ISO, if you do not already run NixOS:
- Download the latest release
- Flash it with Rufus or
dd - Boot — it logs in automatically as
operator - Connect with
nmtui, then runannixion-install
On a machine already running NixOS:
git clone https://github.com/Pyth3rEx/AnNIXion ~/.dotfiles
cp /etc/nixos/hardware-configuration.nix ~/.dotfiles/
git -C ~/.dotfiles add hardware-configuration.nix -f
sudo nixos-rebuild switch --flake ~/.dotfiles#AnNIXion --impureThe toolset is large — allow 30–60 minutes on a slow connection. After the first
build, rebuild, upgrade and update handle the rest.
Hyper-V setup and the full walkthrough: docs/installation.md
| Guide | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Installation | Prerequisites, deploy steps, Hyper-V Enhanced Session |
| Usage | The annixion-* commands, browser profiles, Burp and VPN setup |
| Customization | The override system, adding tools, the dev environment |
| Architecture | Repository layout, the tool catalog, how to add a tool |
| Shell reference | Prompt, keybindings, aliases, plugins |
| CLI tools | bat, ripgrep, fd, fzf, jq and the rest |
| Hardening | What is disabled, what is deliberately left alone, how to restore it |
| Visual identity | Palette, typography, the mark system |
| Developer guide | Local CI levels and the contributor workflow |
| Testing | The suite, and the rule that every feature ships with its tests |
| FAQ | Install, boot, browser, proxy and CI troubleshooting |
| Roadmap | What is done, and what is planned |
| Security | Posture, the bill of materials, reporting a vulnerability |
| Contributing | Branch model, conventions, what to run before a PR |
Built on NixOS and proud of the lineage. Not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to the NixOS Foundation or the Nix project.
For authorized security testing, research and educational use only. Obtain explicit written permission before any assessment. The authors assume no liability for misuse.