shannon: an autonomous white-box AI pentester that validates vulnerabilities through real exploitation
What it solves
Shannon addresses the security gap created by rapid development cycles where traditional annual penetration tests are insufficient. It provides on-demand, automated white-box security testing for web applications and APIs, ensuring vulnerabilities are found and proven before they reach production.
How it works
Shannon uses a multi-agent workflow that combines source-code analysis with live exploitation. It operates in several stages:
- Pre-Reconnaissance: Scans the source code to identify frameworks, entry points, and potential attack surfaces.
- Reconnaissance: Maps the live application's attack surface and correlates runtime behavior with the code.
- Vulnerability Analysis: Deploys specialized agents to look for specific issues like Injection, XSS, SSRF, and Broken Authentication/Authorization.
- Exploitation: Executes real proof-of-concept attacks to validate findings, discarding any that cannot be proven.
- Reporting: Generates a Markdown report containing only validated vulnerabilities with reproducible steps.
Who it’s for
It is designed for developers and security teams who own or have explicit authorization to test web applications and APIs, and want to integrate automated pentesting into their build or release pipelines.
Highlights
- Proof-by-exploitation: Only reports vulnerabilities that have been successfully exploited with a working proof-of-concept.
- White-box approach: Uses source-code analysis to guide dynamic testing and focus on realistic attack paths.
- Autonomous execution: Handles everything from reconnaissance to final reporting from a single command.
- Authenticated testing: Supports custom login flows, TOTP, and email-based authentication.
- OWASP-focused: Specifically targets high-impact issues like Injection, XSS, SSRF, and authorization failures.