Kunai
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Kunai is a Linux security monitoring and threat-hunting tool that uses eBPFeBPFA Linux technology for running verified programs inside the kernel without changing its source. Tools use it to observe processes, enforce rules and process network traffic. kernel-level probes to capture, enrich, and correlate system events.
{"uuid": "81050c82-68a5-4130-a56d-a465c8337066", "source": "ThreatFeed-2024", "value": "malicious-c2.example.com", "severity": 8}
{"uuid": "dd19ecd1-8237-427a-9b1d-35ff7d17381f", "source": "ThreatFeed-2024", "value": "203.0.113.42", "severity": 10}
kunai run -r rule.yaml
kunai run --include write_close -r /tmp/scan.yaml
name: include.all.but.noisy
type: filter
match-on:
events:
kunai:
- '-mprotect_exec'
- '-prctl'
name: mimic.kthread
type: detection
meta:
tags: ['os:linux']
attack: [T1036]
match-on:
events:
kunai: [execve, execve_script]
matches:
$task_is_kthread: .info.task.flags &= '0x200000'
$kthread_names: .info.task.name ~= '^(kworker)'
condition: not $task_is_kthread and $kthread_names
kunai replay --benchmark events.jsonl
kunai logs
kunai replay --input /var/lib/kunai/events.bin
Summary
Kunai is an open-source detection-engineering tool that monitors Linux systems for security events using eBPF probes, capturing kernel-level activity and correlating it into chronologically ordered, enriched events in userland. It ships as a self-contained Rust binary you install and run directly on a host, including inside containers, since it understands Linux namespaces and can trace container activity alongside the underlying system. This makes it a fit for detection engineers and threat hunters running Linux fleets rather than desktop endpoints. Its own README describes it as the Linux counterpart to Sysmon, with detection rules supporting YARA-X matching, filtering, and testing from the CLI. First committed in 2023, it has had 153 commits and 10 releases in the past year, suggesting active, ongoing development.
Kunai is a Linux security monitoring and threat-hunting tool that uses eBPF kernel-level probes to capture, enrich, and correlate system events.
How Kunai helps
What is happening on this host right now, in the order it actually occurred?
streams kernel-level events captured by eBPF probes into a single chronologically ordered feed, with reordering and enrichment done in userland before anything reaches the analyst
Did the activity I'm seeing come from inside a container or from the underlying host?
understands Linux namespaces so container process activity is traced and attributed alongside host-level events rather than blurred together
Which processes on this box are spawning suspicious children, and with what command line?
execve events carry parent command-line context, letting an analyst trace the full lineage of a suspicious execution back to what launched it
Is this network activity from my host the same connection another tool logged elsewhere?
tags network events with a Community-ID value so the same flow can be matched across Kunai and other monitoring tools
Am I losing visibility during a burst of activity?
emits an event when the kernel drops events before they reach userland, and rate-limits filesystem events per task and globally so floods don't silently swallow data
Would this detection rule actually fire on the events I've already collected?
runs saved detection rules against a stored log of events and reports matches, so rule logic can be checked before it is trusted live
Languages
Command line
No command matches.
| option | found in | since | description |
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Values are placeholders taken from each option’s declared default. Nothing is executed here — the output shown is a recording of a run that already happened.
Score card
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Shipping velocity releases a month, last 12 months
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Documentation quality release-notes rubric, 0–100
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Breaking-change discipline how rarely a release breaks users, and notice given
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Maintenance risk quiet time against its own cadence, maintainers
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Innovation & surface new capabilities, API and MCP surface
- Community health
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Contributor trend distinct committers, this year against last
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Maintainer concentration bus factor now against a year ago
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Issue backlog trend issues closed per issue opened, 12 months
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Responsiveness median time to a maintainer’s first reply
Nine scores for Kunai, each built from the releases, notes and API history this site tracks — and, on Researcher and Business, where it stands among every measured tool in its category and how that has moved.
Score cards are part of every paid plan.
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Blank means never measured; nothing here is a filled-in zero.
Peer standings are included with Researcher and Business. See how this tool ranks against its competitors, using data we don't publish anywhere else.
See plans →Each score is 0–100 on a published rubric, derived from data this site already shows. A dimension we cannot measure says so — it is never scored 0 and never enters a rank.
How this is scored
- Shipping velocity — releases a month over the last 12 months, on a log scale where 16 a month scores 100. Needs 3 releases in the window.
- Documentation quality — the release-notes rubric published on the analytics page, unchanged.
- Breaking-change discipline — the share of releases carrying a breaking change (none scores 100, half or more scores 0). Only projects that label breaking changes are measured: a clean record cannot be told from an unlabelled one.
- Maintenance risk — quiet time measured against the tool's own release cadence (quiet longer than 90 days and three typical gaps scores 0), plus the number of active maintainers and whether contributors are growing, where known. Higher is lower risk.
- Innovation & surface — new capabilities in the feature ledger this year, API and MCP operations added, and the share of commits that are features: the mean of whichever we hold.
- Community health (open-source tools only) — each is a direction, not a size: contributors this year against last, the bus factor now against a year ago, and issues closed per issue opened, where steady scores 50, doubled 100 and halved 0; plus the median time to a maintainer's first reply (an hour scores about 100, a month or more 0). A commercial card has no repository and carries none of the four.
- Documented delivery (commercial tools) — when a vendor's documented new capabilities have slowed against its own baseline, that counts against the overall standing as heavily as two low dimensions. Steady delivery, or too little history to judge, leaves the standing alone; it is never a sixth score.
- Open-source tools are scored on repository signals; commercial tools on their published changelog. Ranks compare tools within one category and one profile and need at least five measured peers; the overall standing needs three ranked dimensions. Best-in-breed or consolidator is a shape, not a quality, and is never scored.
Release-note detail over time
See how much detail Kunai puts in its release notes, quarter by quarter, and compare it with tracked tools in the same category. This history uses up to ten retained, reviewed notes per tool; sparse or blank older quarters may reflect that limit.
Checking release-note history…
Coverage
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What Kunai connects to, runs on and detects, read from its release notes and docs. So far: 2 new detections, 1 new supported platform.
3 changes, tracked since Oct 9, 2026.
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Oct 92026
new Kunai YAML detection rules with MITRE ATT&CK tagging
With execve, execve_script, T1036, mimic.kthread
Detection rules are simple YAML files matching on any event field. This one catches binaries masquerading as kernel threads, a technique sometimes used by malware to hide itself.
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Oct 92026
new IoC matching and YARA file scanning with triggered actions
With IoCs
Match indicators of compromise live, scan files with YARA and trigger actions such as killing a malicious process.
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Oct 92026
new Container-aware Linux security monitoring via eBPF
With Aya
Container Aware: Monitor activity inside your containers and apply all your threat-hunting rules to them seamlessly. Built with the Aya library: low overhead, memory safe and running on a wide range of kernels.
Agent frameworks & SDKs 1
Operating systems 1
Other 1
Nothing first seen in this window. That doesn't mean Kunai shipped nothing, only that we found no record of it.
How we count
Read from 1 of 14 release notes and docs updates we hold for Kunai. "First seen" is the earliest note that names something; "last" is the latest. Our history may start partway through Kunai's life, so an old integration can show a recent first-seen date.
Each change counts once: "added 40 checks" is one line, so the numbers measure how often coverage moves, not how big the catalogue is or how well it detects.
Releases
14 entries
No entries match these filters.
- October 20264
- June 20251
- February 20251
- January 20252
- November 20242
- July 20242
- May 20241
- April 20241
Project health
Issue, contributor and maintainer activity in kunai-project/kunai, 2023-12 – 2026-11, as of 2026-11-03. Twelve-month figures first; the trend lines run the whole window.
- Contributors 2 ±0 vs prior 12 months
- Maintainers 1 +0 joined · −0 left, last 12 months
- Bus factor 1 committers behind half the commits
- Community-filed 86% of issues opened, last 12 months
- Median time to close 10 days first maintainer reply 9.8 days
- Open backlog 14 of 91 issues ever filed
- Issues opened / month 1 · 0 communitymaintainers
- Open backlog 14
- Contributors / month 0
- Commits / month 0
- Stars 1,091
- features 21%
- other 79%
Counts from the project's public repository and git history; no individuals are identified. Maintainers are the committers covering 80% of the last year's commits. how we measure this
Libraries its release ships
What its latest release locks, checked against known advisories.None of its release's images build from a lockfile we can read.
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