Reference · 4 min read

System requirements

Noxen runs on Apple Silicon Macs with macOS 26 or later. Network requirements are SSH outbound to your hosts and HTTPS outbound to feed.noxen.app — nothing inbound, no agent installed on remote hosts.

macOS app

Requirement	Detail
macOS version	26 or later
Architecture	Apple Silicon (M1, M2, M3, M4, or newer). Intel is not supported — macOS 26 itself drops Intel.
RAM	4 GB minimum; 8 GB recommended for fleets > 100 hosts
Disk	~150 MB for the app; ~100 MB for the CVE feed; ~500 MB working set during SQLite import on large fleets
Distribution	Developer ID + Sparkle (auto-update). Not on the Mac App Store — see why we ship via Developer ID.

App Sandbox is intentionally disabled

Noxen does not ship with App Sandbox enabled (ENABLE_APP_SANDBOX: false in the project config). Two reasons:

Raw socket port scanning — the port-scan probe uses Apple's Network.framework for TCP connect probes. Sandbox would block the wide-open port range we need.
SSH config import — reading ~/.ssh/config from the user's home directory directly is more reliable than NSOpenPanel security-scoped bookmarks.

The trade-off: Noxen ships via Developer ID with Sparkle for updates, not the Mac App Store. We notarise every release. Full reasoning →

Permissions Noxen requests

Outgoing network — required, granted at first launch. Used for the CVE feed download, Sparkle update check, and SSH/TCP/HTTP probes against your enrolled hosts.
Background item — optional, granted if you enable scheduled scans. Registers NoxenAgent as a per-user LaunchAgent.
Notifications — optional, granted if you want a Mac-side toast on scheduled-scan completion.
iCloud (CloudKit) — entitlement is provisioned for the upcoming iOS view-only companion, but the macOS app currently stores all data locally (CloudKit sync is wired but disabled in v1.0). No iCloud account is required to use Noxen.

Network requirements (outbound)

Destination	Why	Frequency
`feed.noxen.app:443`	Signed CVE feed manifest + snapshot	Once per UTC-day on Live Feed; per-release on Noxen 1.x
`noxen.app/appcast.xml:443`	Sparkle update check	Per launch (cached 24 h)
`your hosts:22` (or custom)	SSH inventory + scan probes	Per scan
`your hosts:<port>`	TCP / HTTP / TLS probes	Per scan, only on open ports
Webhook URLs (Slack/Discord/Teams/custom)	Critical-finding alerts	Per new finding ≥ minimum severity

Remote host requirements

SSH server — OpenSSH on Linux, macOS, or BSD. dropbear works for connection but the SSH inventory probe expects standard cat /etc/os-release + dpkg/rpm output.
SSH key auth — any key type your system's /usr/bin/ssh supports (Ed25519, ECDSA, RSA). Noxen shells out to the OpenSSH binary that ships with macOS, so anything that works in your terminal works here.
Read access — the SSH user only needs read access; Noxen never writes. dpkg -l / rpm -qa are non-root commands on most distros.
Disk & CPU — negligible. The per-scan footprint on the remote host is a handful of cat + package-list reads.

Supported distros for CVE matching

Out of the box: Ubuntu (LTS lines), Debian, Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux. Other distros can still be enrolled and scanned for network exposures (port scan, TLS, HTTP headers, admin surfaces) — only the CVE-vs-package match is distro-gated. OpenSUSE, Alpine, and FreeBSD support is on the roadmap.