Ares

AI-native host security investigator for Linux.
Continuous eBPF telemetry with minute-by-minute AI investigation.

An AI-native host investigation and response layer for production Linux infrastructure.

Ares continuously records process, network, filesystem, identity and persistence events, runs deterministic detection in real time, and every minute runs an AI investigation cycle that reconstructs suspicious activity into an evidence-backed verdict.

The design principle (spec §1):

The daemon records what happened. The detection engine decides what deserves attention. The AI investigator determines what the evidence means.

Architecture

kernel/OS ──► sensors ──► redaction + enrichment ──► SQLite store
                                     │
                          streaming detector ──► immediate critical path
                                     │                 (evidence capture)
                                     ▼
              one-minute scheduler ──► correlation ──► cases ──► AI investigator
                                     │
                          policy + response ──► notifications / approved actions

Platform support

The first release targets Linux (Ubuntu/Debian/Amazon Linux/Rocky/Alma). The sensor layer is abstracted: eBPF is preferred on Linux, with an automatic procfs/psutil/inotify fallback (spec §8.2) that also lets the full pipeline run on macOS for development.

Install

pip install -e ".[dev,fs]"       # from source

Optional extras: ai (Anthropic-native provider), api (local HTTP API), fs (watchdog filesystem watcher). The OpenAI SDK (used for OpenRouter) is a core dependency.

Quick start (dev, no root)

export ARES_STATE_DIR="$HOME/.ares"      # dev state dir
ares init
ares daemon run            # terminal 1: collect + detect
ares investigator run      # terminal 2: one-minute investigation cycle
ares status
ares cases list

AI investigation (OpenRouter by default)

The default provider is OpenRouter, so you can run any model with two environment variables — no code or config changes:

export OPENROUTER_API_KEY=sk-or-...
export OPENROUTER_MODEL=anthropic/claude-3.5-sonnet   # any OpenRouter model id

Other backends (set investigation.model_provider to match):

If no credentials are present the investigator automatically falls back to local, so a fresh install runs with zero configuration and lights up the moment you set the env vars. Secrets are read from the environment, never stored in config. See examples/ares.env.example.

Notifications

Ares pushes incidents out over outbound-only channels — nothing inbound has to be exposed on the host. Configure any subset via env vars:

export ARES_NOTIFY_MIN_SEVERITY=high                    # global floor
export ARES_SLACK_WEBHOOK=https://hooks.slack.com/...   # recommended default
export ARES_PAGERDUTY_ROUTING_KEY=...                   # pages on-call (critical)
export ARES_NOTIFY_WEBHOOK=https://ops.internal/ares    # route anywhere
export ARES_SMTP_HOST=smtp.example.com ARES_SMTP_TO=secops@example.com  # email

ares notify channels     # show what's active
ares notify test         # send a test alert through every channel

Alert fatigue is controlled by the global severity floor, PagerDuty's separate higher threshold, and case deduplication (repeat activity updates one case / one PagerDuty incident rather than paging repeatedly).

Response safety

• Default mode is recommend: nothing destructive runs automatically.
• Only allow-listed evidence actions (hash/capture/preserve) run without approval. Containment/recovery actions require explicit operator approval and carry rollback metadata (spec §22.3).
• delete_file and execute_generated_shell_command are prohibited; the language model never receives shell access (spec §22.3).

Python API

from ares import Ares

client = Ares.from_config("examples/config.yaml")
print(client.status())
for case in client.cases.list(status="open"):
    print(case["title"], case["risk_score"])

Testing

pytest            # unit + integration + attack simulations (safe fixtures)

Status

This repository implements Phase 1 and the core of Phase 2 (spec §36). The eBPF programs (bpf/) and privileged response helper are Linux integration steps; see docs/ for the roadmap and security model.

Licensed under Apache-2.0.