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

• 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.

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.

cargo build --release

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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