skills-ws/skills/security-pentester/references/3-understanding-the-pipeline.md

87 agent skills for AI coding assistants — marketing, growth, web3, dev, design & operations. Built for OpenClaw, Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex.

## Contents

- 3. Understanding the Pipeline
- 4-Phase Architecture
- What Each Phase Does

## 3. Understanding the Pipeline

### 4-Phase Architecture

```
Phase 1: RECONNAISSANCE
  ├── Pre-Recon (source code analysis with configured LLM)
  │   └── Outputs: code_analysis_deliverable.md
  └── Recon (attack surface mapping with Playwright + Nmap)
      └── Outputs: recon_deliverable.md

Phase 2: VULNERABILITY ANALYSIS (5 parallel agents)
  ├── Injection Analysis   → injection_analysis.md + exploitation_queue.json
  ├── XSS Analysis         → xss_analysis.md + exploitation_queue.json
  ├── Auth Analysis        → auth_analysis.md + exploitation_queue.json
  ├── SSRF Analysis        → ssrf_analysis.md + exploitation_queue.json
  └── AuthZ Analysis       → authz_analysis.md + exploitation_queue.json

Phase 3: EXPLOITATION (5 parallel agents, conditional)
  ├── Injection Exploit    → injection_exploitation_evidence.md
  ├── XSS Exploit          → xss_exploitation_evidence.md
  ├── Auth Exploit         → auth_exploitation_evidence.md
  ├── SSRF Exploit         → ssrf_exploitation_evidence.md
  └── AuthZ Exploit        → authz_exploitation_evidence.md

Phase 4: REPORTING
  └── Security-Assessment-Report.md
```

### What Each Phase Does

**Pre-Recon** reads source code to understand the application architecture, identify entry points, map data flows, and find potential vulnerability patterns before any network interaction.

**Recon** maps the live attack surface: crawls the app with a headless browser, enumerates API endpoints, identifies technologies, scans for open ports.

**Vulnerability Analysis** agents work in parallel, each specializing in one category. They combine source code knowledge with recon data to hypothesize specific vulnerabilities and create exploitation queues.

**Exploitation** agents receive the queues and attempt real attacks using browser automation (Playwright) and HTTP requests. Only proven exploits are included in the final report.

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