Go on The Manticore Project

Manticore v1.0.9 - Complete SMBv1, NDR 2.0, and the first RPC interfaces

Tue, 09 Jun 2026 12:46:25 +0000

We tagged Manticore v1.0.9 today. The release title is complete working SMBv1, NDR 2.0, and a bit of RPC, and that is a fair summary of where the bulk of the work went. It is the largest release the library has shipped so far, with several hundred merged pull requests. The practical result is that Manticore can now drive an SMBv1 session and DCE/RPC calls end to end.

This post walks through what changed, grouped by area.

Go - Building CLI tools with goopts, a command-line argument parsing library

Tue, 20 May 2025 10:00:00 +0000

When I started building security tools in Go for The Manticore Project, I quickly ran into a recurring problem. Every tool needed argument parsing: authentication flags, LDAP connection settings, debug options, positional arguments for modes and subcommands. Go’s standard flag package handles simple cases, but it does not support argument groups, subcommands, mutually exclusive options, or even required arguments.

I looked at existing libraries. Some were too minimal, others tried to do too much and imposed heavy conventions on how you structure your code. None of them felt right for the kind of tools I was building: security tools with multiple modes (like audit, add, remove), each with their own set of arguments, and common argument groups for authentication and LDAP settings.

Manticore v1.0.0: The beast awakens

Tue, 13 May 2025 05:49:58 +0000

Over the past while, building security tooling for The Manticore Project, I kept running into the same situation: each new tool needed the same low-level building blocks. LDAP connectivity and authentication, protocol structures, cryptography helpers, and the assorted primitives that sit underneath any serious offensive or defensive utility. Re-implementing these per tool is wasteful and error-prone, so I started consolidating them into a single, reusable Go library.

That library is Manticore, and this v1.0.0 release marks its first public release.