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Top 23 C Security Projects
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Project mention: Cloudflare Reclaimed 100TB of RAM With Math You Can Use on Your Own Stack | dev.to | 2026-09-20
The NGINX hash module with the hardcoded 160: ngx_http_upstream_hash_module.c
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AppSignal
Monitoring that respects your time & budget. APM, error tracking, and dashboards for modern web apps. Ten-minute setup, transparent flat pricing, and support from engineers who actually use the product.
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Project mention: Building a comfortable workflow for debugging an old version of the Linux kernel | dev.to | 2026-05-24
FROM ubuntu:16.04 RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y \ build-essential \ gcc \ make \ libncurses5-dev \ libssl-dev \ bc \ bison \ flex \ nano \ git \ cpio \ openssh-client \ wget \ bzip2 \ ca-certificates \ linux-headers-generic \ && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/* WORKDIR /opt RUN git clone https://github.com/radareorg/radare2 \ && radare2/sys/install.sh --install \ && rm -rf radare2 WORKDIR /build
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systeminformer
A free, powerful, multi-purpose tool that helps you monitor system resources, debug software and detect malware. Brought to you by Winsider Seminars & Solutions, Inc. @ https://windows-internals.com
Project mention: Show HN: Network Monitor – a GUI to spot anomalous connections on your Linux | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-11-24I wish Linux had two more things:
- https://github.com/winsiderss/systeminformer power-user process explorer
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That question is especially useful this week. The OpenVPN community project published v2.7.7 on September 3, 2026. Meanwhile, the current OpenVPN Connect for Windows release-notes page lists 3.9.0, released June 8, 2026. Those numbers belong to different release lines. Comparing them as if one were the newer version of the other produces an unreliable upgrade plan. Community release, Connect for Windows release notes.
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Compare your implementation to Nmap's source code - industry standard for 20+ years.
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Unicorn Engine
Unicorn CPU emulator framework (ARM, AArch64, M68K, Mips, Sparc, PowerPC, RiscV, S390x, TriCore, X86)
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capstone
Capstone disassembly/disassembler framework for ARM, ARM64 (ARMv8), Alpha, BPF, Ethereum VM, HPPA, LoongArch, M68K, M680X, Mips, MOS65XX, PPC, RISC-V(rv32G/rv64G), SH, Sparc, SystemZ, TMS320C64X, TriCore, Webassembly, XCore and X86.
Project mention: Capstone – lightweight multi-platform, multi-architecture disassembly framework | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-06-02 -
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AFLplusplus
AFL++ is a state-of-the-art fuzzer, and #1 in benchmarks. It was originally based on AFL. Today it comes with qemu 5.1, collision-free coverage, enhanced laf-intel & redqueen, AFLfast++ power schedules, MOpt mutators, unicorn_mode, and a lot more!
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Cryptography is real, but nobody in that field seems to be hubristic enough to think their methods are flawless, and there's a degree of suspicion than the best models may have secret weaknesses engineered into them by the governments who sponsored them.
Physics is real and networking requires a substrate. But there are already known exploits which can misuse the compute hardware as an antenna, e.g. my first search result: https://github.com/fulldecent/system-bus-radio
(Older nerds may remember https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Eck_phreaking)
> Magic is not real
Turning lead into gold isn't the magic of alchemy, it's just nucleosynthesis. -
Suricata
Suricata is a network Intrusion Detection System, Intrusion Prevention System and Network Security Monitoring engine developed by the OISF and the Suricata community.
Project mention: Homelab security on 512 MB: warden scores my logs and asks before it bans anything | dev.to | 2026-10-10Network. Suricata for IDS, matching against threat feeds (FireHOL level 1, Feodo, OpenPhish), plus new-device alerts on the LAN.
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Project mention: Security in the AI Era: Every Request Has a Cost — Three Layers of Defense for Your Application | dev.to | 2026-10-13
Tetragon is a CNCF project from the Cilium team that uses eBPF to observe and enforce security policy inside the Linux kernel: process execution, file access, network connections and privilege changes, tagged with the Kubernetes pod and workload they came from. Because enforcement happens in the kernel, it can stop an action synchronously instead of alerting after the fact.
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OSSEC
OSSEC is an Open Source Host-based Intrusion Detection System that performs log analysis, file integrity checking, policy monitoring, rootkit detection, real-time alerting and active response.
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Mostly correct. The majority of work in both is currently done by Damien and myself, who work on both.
There are a couple of people who have done significant work on OpenBSD's ssh (eg Markus, Theo) and various OpenBSD folks who add a feature or fix a bug and move on.
There is one person who currently works exclusively on -Portable (Tim Rice, who is still around although not very active these days) and at least one other in the past (Andre Lucas, who wrote the multi-platform login recording code). You can see the current set here: https://github.com/openssh/openssh-portable/blob/master/.git...
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unikraft
A next-generation cloud native kernel designed to unlock best-in-class performance, security primitives and efficiency savings.
Unikernels with POSIX compatibility.
Each application gets its own fine grained security.
https://github.com/unikraft/unikraft
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honggfuzz
Security oriented software fuzzer. Supports evolutionary, feedback-driven fuzzing based on code coverage (SW and HW based)
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Project mention: AI-Augmented Series: AI Scripting for Brute-Forcing on a Web App Pentest | dev.to | 2026-09-10
I almost always work in a venv with python. After creating it, I had to install requests and pycryptodome with pip.
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Project mention: What Really Happens When You Access AWS: Complete Data Flow Example | dev.to | 2025-11-11
tcpdump - Command-line packet analyzer
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Project mention: Show HN: Ant – A JavaScript Runtime and Ecosystem | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-07-11
on linux its kvm, on darwin its hypervisor.framework, the memory is not upfront, by default 256mb is lazy allocated, and ~35mb are used by both ant + the vm. the kernel is https://nanos.org with patches to get ant+networking running smoothly
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Project mention: Evaluating and mitigating the growing risk of LLM-discovered 0-days | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-02-06
Glad to see that they brought in humans to validate and patch vulnerabilities. Although, I really wish they linked to the actual patches. Here's what I could find:
https://cgit.ghostscript.com/cgi-bin/cgit.cgi/ghostpdl.git/c...
https://github.com/OpenSC/OpenSC/pull/3554
https://github.com/dloebl/cgif/pull/84
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NOTE:
The open source projects on this list are ordered by number of github stars.
The number of mentions indicates repo mentiontions in the last 12 Months or
since we started tracking (Dec 2020).
C Security discussion
C Security related posts
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Security in the AI Era: Every Request Has a Cost — Three Layers of Defense for Your Application
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OpenSSH 10.6 Released
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I captured 72 hours of idle Android packets behind pfSense
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Part 1: Least-privilege Kubernetes, generated from what eBPF saw
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AI-Augmented Series: AI Scripting for Brute-Forcing on a Web App Pentest
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A Practical Release Inventory for OpenVPN Deployments
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The nginx misconfigurations that fail silently
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A note from our sponsor - SaaSHub
www.saashub.com | 15 Oct 2026
Index
What are some of the best open-source Security projects in C? This list will help you:
| # | Project | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Nginx | 31,844 |
| 2 | radare2 | 24,955 |
| 3 | systeminformer | 16,210 |
| 4 | OpenVPN | 14,653 |
| 5 | nmap | 13,743 |
| 6 | Unicorn Engine | 9,415 |
| 7 | capstone | 9,067 |
| 8 | aircrack-ng | 7,715 |
| 9 | arkime | 7,534 |
| 10 | AFLplusplus | 6,789 |
| 11 | system-bus-radio | 6,727 |
| 12 | Suricata | 6,714 |
| 13 | tetragon | 5,067 |
| 14 | OSSEC | 5,061 |
| 15 | HyperDbg | 4,123 |
| 16 | openssh-portable | 4,040 |
| 17 | rizin | 3,952 |
| 18 | unikraft | 3,888 |
| 19 | honggfuzz | 3,394 |
| 20 | pycryptodome | 3,273 |
| 21 | tcpdump | 3,244 |
| 22 | nanos | 3,201 |
| 23 | OpenSC | 3,107 |
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