📖Terminology

Ax Controller

The machine you install Ax on is called the Ax Controller. The Controller manages all aspects of Ax, including account setup, building your Packer image, spinning up and SSHing into instances, creating new images from existing instances, deleting instances and images, managing distributed scanning, and much more!

The Ax Controller executes the various scripts in ~/.axiom/interact and stores account credentials in ~/.axiom/accounts/$account-profile-name.json

Build

During first time setup, you'll have to create a Packer image. This is the ax build process. You can also rebuild your image at any time by running ax build --setup

Instance

When you spin up one cloud compute device from the Packer image (e.g. ax init --run), we call it an Ax instance.

Fleet

More than one instance is known as a fleet (e.g.ax fleet -i 10). A fleet consists of a set of hosts, these can be used for parallel file transfers, scans, or parallel command execution.

Interlace

A Python script created by codingo and sml555 to "Easily turn single threaded command line applications into a fast, multi-threaded application with CIDR and glob support." Ax uses Interlace extensively for all of our parallelism.

Simple Module

ax scan Simple Modules executes a bash command on every remote instance apart of the scan.

One-Shot Module

If a module contains the string _target_ or _safe-target_ , ax scan will execute it as a One-Shot Module. One-Shot Modules utilize Interlace to easily manage the threading of arbitrary binaries and scripts.

Selected

Using ax select you pick the instance(s) to use when executing ax exec and ax scan

Provisioner

The file detailing what tools to install as part of the build process.

Provider

The cloud provider and the functions sourced to interact with it.

Account JSON or axiom.json

The JSON file storing you user data and cloud credentials. A symbolic link from ~/.axiom/accounts/$profile-name.json to ~/.axiom/axiom.json

Axiom Classic

Our proud origins. Axiom Classic is the first iteration of our dynamic distributed scanning framework.

Ax Framework

Our next-gen iteration of our dynamic distributed scanning framework. Axiom Classic users should feel right at home using Ax, with all the familiarity and simplicity from Axiom. Rebuilt to last, with auditability, transparency and improved functionality as our primary motivators.