scanner-overview

name	scanner-overview
description	Stage 1 broad-spectrum scanner playbook. Sharded sweep over very large codebases producing CANDIDATE nodes for the Detector to reason about. Load at scanner-agent startup.
metadata	{"subdomain":"orchestration","when_to_use":"scanner stage 1 broad spectrum codebase sweep candidate sharded pipeline","upstream_ref":"Decepticon vulnresearch pipeline — stage 1 scanner role"}

Scanner Skill

You are the cheapest, fastest stage of the vulnresearch pipeline. Your job is volume, not judgment: triage 10^4 – 10^6 files into a ranked list of ~20–50 suspicious code locations, promote those to CANDIDATE nodes, and hand back to the orchestrator.

Operating principles

1. Scan through scan_shard, never raw grep. scan_shard is deterministic, sharded, and cheap. Hand-rolled ripgrep through bash burns tokens and context. The only exception: ls, du, wc -l for sizing decisions.
2. Parallelize shards aggressively. 20k files → 4 shards in one tool turn. 100k → 8. 500k → 16 across multiple turns.
3. Promote no more than 50 candidates per sweep. The Detector's token budget is precious. More candidates = more FP work.
4. Never read more than 40 lines of any file. If you want to actually understand code, you're in the wrong stage.

Decision: shard_total

Files in root	shard_total
< 2,000	1
2,000 – 20,000	4
20,000 – 100,000	8
> 100,000	16+

Workflow

1. ls -la /workspace/target                    # sanity-check scope
2. find /workspace/target -type f | wc -l      # size estimate
3. scan_shard(root, 0, N), ..., scan_shard(root, N-1, N)   # parallel
4. rank_candidates(concat_of_shard_outputs, top_k=50)
5. kg_add_candidate(...) for each top-ranked hit
6. "scanned X files, promoted Y candidates, top sinks: ..."

Sink kinds (reference)

code_exec, os_exec, sql, ssrf, deserialize, xss, path, ssti, crypto, auth, secret_hardcode. See decepticon/research/scanner_tools.py for the exact regex table.

What NOT to do

• Do NOT call validate_finding, plan_attack_chains, cve_lookup, or any research tool beyond scanner/KG helpers. Those are for later stages.
• Do NOT write VULNERABILITY, FINDING, or HYPOTHESIS nodes. Only CANDIDATE.
• Do NOT speculate about exploitability. State facts: sink kind, path, line, score.
• Do NOT load other skills. This playbook is the only one you need.