This is a community-maintained open-source project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by VMware, Inc. or Broadcom Inc. "VMware" and "NSX" are trademarks of Broadcom Inc.

Author: Wei Zhou, VMware by Broadcom — wei-wz.zhou@broadcom.com

If you discover a security vulnerability, please report it privately:

• Email: wei-wz.zhou@broadcom.com
• GitHub: Open a private security advisory

Do not open a public GitHub issue for security vulnerabilities.

• Passwords are stored exclusively in ~/.vmware-nsx-security/.env (never in config.yaml, never in code)
• .env file permissions are verified at startup (chmod 600 required)
• No credentials are logged, echoed, or included in audit entries
• Each NSX Manager target uses a separate environment variable: VMWARE_<TARGET_NAME_UPPER>_PASSWORD

All write operations pass through multiple safety layers:

1. @vmware_tool decorator — mandatory on every MCP tool; provides pre-checks, audit logging, data sanitization, and timeout control
2. Double confirmation — CLI destructive commands (DFW policy delete, security group delete, IDS/IPS config changes) require two separate "Are you sure?" prompts
3. DFW policy deletion guard — policy delete checks for active rules before proceeding; policies with active rules require explicit override
4. Security group deletion guard — group delete checks for references (policies, rules, other groups that depend on it) and rejects deletion if references exist
5. Traceflow safety — Traceflow operations are strictly read-only and cannot modify network state
6. IDS/IPS confirmation — IDS/IPS configuration changes (enable, disable, profile updates) require double confirmation due to security impact
7. Audit logging — every operation (read and write) is logged to ~/.vmware/audit.db (SQLite WAL) with timestamp, user, target, operation, parameters, and result
8. Policy engine — ~/.vmware/rules.yaml can deny operations by pattern, enforce maintenance windows, and set risk-level thresholds

• TLS certificate verification is enabled by default
• disableSslCertValidation: true exists solely for NSX Manager instances using self-signed certificates in isolated lab/home environments
• In production, always use CA-signed certificates with full TLS verification

• vmware-policy is the only transitive dependency auto-installed; it provides the @vmware_tool decorator and audit logging
• All other dependencies are standard Python packages (requests, Click, Rich, python-dotenv)
• No post-install scripts or background services are started during installation
• PyPI package name: vmware-nsx-security

• All NSX-sourced content (policy names, rule descriptions, security group members, IDS/IPS alert details) is processed through _sanitize()
• Sanitization truncates to 500 characters and strips C0/C1 control characters
• Output is wrapped in boundary markers when consumed by LLM agents

This project is scanned with Bandit before every release, targeting 0 Medium+ issues:

uvx bandit -r vmware_nsx_security/ mcp_server/