| 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. |
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
- 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.
- Parallelize shards aggressively. 20k files → 4 shards in one tool
turn. 100k → 8. 500k → 16 across multiple turns.
- Promote no more than 50 candidates per sweep. The Detector's token
budget is precious. More candidates = more FP work.
- 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
botron/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.
