ghstshdw
8.5 KiB
GreySec RED — Sales Specification
Product: GreySec Exploit Development Pipeline Status: Internal — for Adam review Date: 2026-05-07 Classification: Internal only — no client-facing numbers
Market Analysis
Why Security Teams Need Fast Exploit Development
Every offensive security engagement has the same bottleneck: getting from a binary target to a working exploit. It takes time. The binary is different every time. The vulnerability class changes. The mitigations change. Even for experienced exploit developers, it's 4-8 hours of focused work per binary.
Now think about a red team engagement with 10 targets. Or a CVE research project with 30 binaries to assess. Or a CTF competition with 15 challenges. The economics don't work if every binary requires 4+ hours of manual RE.
The market has tools for this — but they're either:
- Manual (expensive, slow, expert-dependent)
- Commercial products (Cobalt Strike, Immunity CANVAS — not RE tools, just C2 platforms)
- Open source one-offs (useful but not turnkey)
What nobody has is a fast, AI-augmented pipeline that takes a binary and produces a working, tested exploit. Until now.
Who Actually Pays for AI-Augmented RE
-
MSSPs running structured red team programs
- They have a quarterly cadence of engagement deliveries
- They need to assess 10-20 binary targets per engagement
- Manual RE burns into their margin
- Willing to pay: $1,000-3,000/month for speed
-
Exploit developers and vulnerability researchers
- They assess third-party binaries for CVEs
- They need fast turnaround to meet disclosure deadlines
- They write PoCs for every confirmed vulnerability
- Willing to pay: $500-1,500/month (they understand the value of speed)
-
CTF teams and competitive hacking groups
- Time is everything in CTF
- Binary challenges are the bottleneck
- Team pricing: $200-500/month for a 5-person team
- Willing to pay: lower price point but high volume
-
Security training organizations
- They build binary exploitation exercises for training curricula
- They need to solve challenges quickly to build course content
- Willing to pay: $300-800/month
The Competitive Gap
Manual RE takes 4-8 hours per binary at $150-300/hr consulting rates = $600-2,400 per binary.
GreySec RED targets $300-800 per binary at 20-90 minute turnaround — 5-10x faster, at 50% the cost.
Competitive Landscape
| Tool | Type | Cost | Strengths | Weaknesses |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Manual RE + exploit dev | Consultant | $150-300/hr | Expert judgment, any target | 4-8 hrs per binary, expensive at scale |
| Metasploit module dev | Consultant | $100-200/hr | Framework integration | Still requires expert, not automated |
| Immunity CANVAS | Commercial | $500+/month | Some automation | Windows-only, dated, slow development |
| Core Impact | Commercial | $8,000+/year | Automated | Expensive, dated, heavy GUI |
| Ghidra + manual | Open source | Free | Powerful RE, any binary | Manual only, no exploit generation |
| radare2 + manual | Open source | Free | Full RE control | Steep learning curve, no exploit gen |
| pwntools (self-use) | Open source | Free | Great for exploit devs | Requires expert, no AI assist |
| ChatGPT/GPT-4 | API | Per-token | Good code generation | No context for binary RE, hallucinations on offsets |
| GreySec RED | AI-augmented service | TBD | Validated exploits, struct.json automation, local model | V1 (new, x86/x64 Linux only) |
GreySec RED's key differentiation:
- Validated against real binary (not just generated — actually tested and PASSED)
- struct.json for CI/CD integration (no other tool outputs machine-readable exploit metadata)
- Speed: 20-90 min per binary vs. 4-8 hours manual
- Local AI model (abliterator) for better exploit code than cloud models
Buyer Personas
Persona 1: Devon, Lead Exploit Developer at Cerberus Security
Who: Devon leads a 4-person exploit development team at a security research firm. They do vulnerability research for CVEs, build PoCs, and occasionally support red team engagements with custom exploits.
Pain: Their CVE pipeline has a backlog of 30 binaries to assess. At 6 hours each, that's 180 hours of RE work. They have two researchers who could be doing novel research instead of solving known binary challenges.
What he really wants: Drop a binary, get a working exploit, move on. Free up his researchers for novel work.
What he'll pay: $1,500/month for a tool that clears half his backlog.
Buying trigger: After losing a bid on a large-scale red team engagement because they couldn't demonstrate fast binary assessment capability.
Persona 2: Aisha, CTF Team Captain — Phantom Division
Who: Aisha captains a 6-person competitive hacking team. They compete in 10-15 CTFs per year. Binary challenges are their strongest category but also their most time-intensive.
Pain: They lose 15-30 minutes on hard binary challenges because RE takes too long. They've placed 3rd in national CTFs by a combined margin of 10 minutes.
What she really wants: A binary goes in, an exploit comes out validated against the real challenge binary.
What she'll pay: $400/month for team pricing.
Buying trigger: After placing 4th in a major CTF by 8 minutes — they had the right exploit approach but ran out of time to finish the RE.
Persona 3: Dr. Michael Torres, Security Researcher at Vela Systems
Who: Michael does vulnerability research at a mid-size security firm. He spends 60% of his time on RE for third-party binaries and 40% on novel CVE discovery. He needs to assess whether a binary is worth pursuing for full disclosure.
Pain: He gets a binary, spends 2 hours REing it, and determines it's not exploitable. He could have spent that time on the next one. He has a pipeline of 40 binaries and needs to triage them fast.
What he really wants: A triage report: is this exploitable, what's the vulnerability class, what's the difficulty?
What he'll pay: $800/month.
Buying trigger: After missing a disclosure deadline because he spent too long on binaries that turned out to be not worth pursuing.
Pricing Framework (Internal)
Direct Cost Basis
| Cost Item | Per Beginner Binary |
|---|---|
| AI compute (Ollama, local) | $0.05-0.15 |
| Human review (5 min at $105/hr) | $8.75 |
| Infrastructure (Kali container) | $0.50 |
| Total | ~$9-10/binary |
At 5x margin: ~$45-50 per beginner binary. At 6x margin: ~$55-60 per beginner binary.
For a monthly subscription at 20 binaries: $900-1,200/month all-in.
Build vs. Buy
| Approach | Cost per Binary | Time per Binary |
|---|---|---|
| Manual RE (consultant) | $600-2,400 | 4-8 hours |
| Manual RE (internal expert) | $80-200 in-house | 4-8 hours |
| GreySec RED | ~$50-150 | 20-90 minutes |
GreySec RED: 5-10x faster, 50-80% cheaper than manual consulting.
Objection Handling
"Why not just use ChatGPT? It's cheaper." ChatGPT can write code but it doesn't understand your specific binary. It doesn't run against your target. It hallucinates offsets and wrong addresses. GreySec RED's model is specifically fine-tuned for offensive security tasks and validates the exploit against the real binary before calling it done.
"How is this different from Metasploit?" Metasploit has pre-built modules for known vulnerabilities. GreySec RED builds an exploit for a binary you've already identified as vulnerable — one that doesn't have a Metasploit module yet. It's the gap between "I know this is vulnerable" and "I have a working exploit."
"Isn't this just for hackers?" It's the same RE skills your security team uses to reverse-engineer malware, audit third-party binaries, and assess vendor software for vulnerabilities. We use it for our own red team engagements. Your binary analysis team can use it for the same purpose.
"What if the exploit gets it wrong?" Every exploit we produce is tested against the real binary. If it fails, test-results.md tells you why and which parameter needs adjustment. You're not flying blind.
"Can it handle real-world binaries, not just CTF challenges?" V1 supports x86/x64 Linux binaries. Real-world binaries are harder — we handle the vulnerability class and offsets correctly, but ASLR/DEP may require a ROP chain that needs manual tuning. The analysis and struct.json are accurate; the exploit may need a human review for advanced mitigations. V2 adds ROP chain builder integration to address this.