wiki
  • 👋Welcome to the Ax Framework Wiki
  • Overview
    • ✅Existing Users
    • 💿Installation Guide
    • 💻Ax Controller
    • 💡How it Works
    • ▶️QuickStart Guide
      • Configure Ax Controller
      • Build a Base Image
      • Deploy Instances
      • List Instances
      • Run Scans
      • Teardown Instances
  • Fundamentals
    • 🛠️Ax Utility Scripts
    • 🔎Bring Your Own Provisioner
    • ⚔️Fleets
    • 🚀Scans
      • 🤖Modules
        • 📤Adding Simple Modules
        • 🎯Adding One-Shot Modules
        • 📎Merging and Module Extensions
      • ⚙️Horizontal vs Vertical Scaling
    • 🤝Responsibility
    • 📖Terminology
Powered by GitBook
On this page
  • Ax Controller
  • Build
  • Instance
  • Fleet
  • Interlace
  • Simple Module
  • One-Shot Module
  • Selected
  • Provisioner
  • Provider
  • Account JSON or axiom.json
  • Axiom Classic
  • Ax Framework
  1. Fundamentals

Terminology

PreviousResponsibility

Last updated 8 months ago

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

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

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

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.

A Python script created by and 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The cloud provider and the sourced to interact with it.

📖
Selected
Provisioner
Provider
functions
Account JSON or axiom.json
Axiom Classic
Ax Framework
Build
Instance
Interlace
codingo
sml555
Ax Controller
Fleet
Simple Module
Simple Modules
One-Shot Module
Interlace
One-Shot Module