Our Mission 🚀

Penflow was created to solve fundamental challenges in IT security work:

Some of these questions may sound familiar: 🤔

• "Did I test everything? Which parts still need testing?"
• "What was that command syntax again?"
• "Which techniques have I tried so far?"
• "Where did I or my colleague leave off and how can I pick up where they left off?"
• "I wish I had one single tool that combines methodology tracking with command management and visualization..."

We solve these pain points by:

1. Making methodology tracking and documentation effortless 📝
2. Providing an organized command library with variable templating 🎯
3. Enabling clear progress visualization and tracking ✅
4. Maintaining secure knowledge sharing while protecting sensitive data 🔒

The Journey to Penflow 🛣️

Like many IT professionals, I've experimented with various tools to manage my knowledge:

• Notion 📚: While powerful and flexible, its cloud-first approach makes it unsuitable for sensitive data
• Dendron 🌳: Though promising, being restricted to VS Code + no proper management (Additionally, the project is no longer maintained)
• Mind Maps 🧠: Love it, but limited in tracking capabilities and difficult to maintain as projects grow
• Various Note-Taking Apps 📝: Good for documentation but poor at methodology tracking
• Todo Lists ✅: Excellent for task management but lacking in visualization
• Obsidian 💎: Great for personal knowledge management but lacks specialized security features and workflow tracking
• Trilium 🌲: Powerful note organization but complex setup and maintenance requirements (Best so far for PKM)

During my first year as an IT student, Me and @Lascc developed HackTools to solve the frustrating problem of constantly searching for payloads. 🛠️ It was a simple web extension that provided standardized reverse shell commands and basic payloads. While helpful for beginners, it only addressed a small part of the larger workflow challenges.

What we really needed was a tool that combines:

• 🗺️ Visual mind mapping for methodology planning
• 🎮 Command templating and standardization
• 💾 Local-first data storage
• 📊 Flexible data organization and visualization
• 📈 Progress tracking and task management
• ✨ Nice and intuitive user interface

This led to the creation of Penflow. While it doesn't aim to replace these excellent tools, we identified a gap in functionality that both @Lascc and I needed - something that could bring together methodology planning, visualization and documentation in an integrated way. 🎯

Session Sharing 🤝

For now, Penflow is a single-user tool that allows:

• Export/Import 📤📥: Export your sessions and templates as encrypted or unencrypted JSON files that can be imported by other Penflow users

Features ⭐

• Markdown Support ✍️: Write and format your Nodes related notes using Markdown syntax
• Variable Groups 🔄: Define sets of environment variables that can be enabled or disabled across sessions (like switching between different user profiles or environments)
• Saving and Restoring 💾: Navigate through your session history and restore previous states that were saved manually
• Local First 🏠: All data is stored locally on your machine with no external dependencies or tracking

Versatility 🎨

While primarily designed for security testing, Penflow's flexible nature makes it suitable for:

• 🛡️ Penetration testing and offensive security operations
• 🎯 Red team engagements and adversary emulation
• 🔍 Blue team operations (forensic methodology, kill chain analysis)
• ✅ Compliance checking
• 📚 Learning path tracking
• 📊 Project management
• 🌟 Anything that requires a methodology / visualization / tracking