A minimalistic cross-platform malware scanner with non-blocking realtime filesystem monitoring using YARA rules.

Sauron is a minimalistic, YARA based malware scanner with realtime filesystem monitoring written in Rust.

Features

• Realtime scan of created and modified files supporting Linux inotify, macOS FSEvents, Windows ReadDirectoryChanges and polling for other platforms.
• YARA engine complete support.
• Single scan mode to scan a folder, report results and exit.
• Parallel scanning using a configurable thread pool.
• Log, text and JSON reporting.

Known Limitations

Due to the filesystem monitoring mechanism, Sauron is extremely lightweight and non invasive as more sophisticated AV solutions, however this comes with the following limitations:

• Scanning files with an exclusive lock by other processes will likely fail with a Permission Denied error.
• Malicious files creation and execution won't be blocked but just reported.
• Fileless malware won't be detected.
• Detected files won't be linked to originating processes.

Building

cargo build --release

Dependencies

Your system must have libssl-dev installed. For Ubuntu-derivatives this can be installed via sudo apt install libssl-dev.

Running

Assuming you have your YARA rules in ./yara-rules (you can find plenty of free rules online):

sudo ./target/release/sauron --rules ./yara-rules

Single Scan

Alternatively you can perform a one-time recursive scan of the specified folder using the --scan argument:

sudo ./target/release/sauron --rules ./yara-rules --scan --root /path/to/scan

You can specify which file extensions to scan (all by default) with the --ext argument:

sudo ./target/release/sauron \
    --rules ./yara-rules \
    --scan \
    --root /path/to/scan \
    --ext exe \
    --ext elf \
    --ext doc \
    --ext docx

Reporting

Various options are available for reporting:

• --report-clean will also report clean files.
• --report-errors explicitly report errors (reported as debug logs by default).
• --report-output <FILENAME> will write scan reports to a file.
• --report-json if --report-output is passed, write as JSON instead of text.

Other options

Run sauron --help for the complete list of options.

License

This project is made with ♥ by @evilsocket and it is released under the GPL3 license.