finding-discipline

Finding Discipline

Overview

The Iron Law: No [CONFIRMED] without proof. A finding is a claim about real, demonstrated

impact — not a status code, a reflected string, or a hunch. This is the offensive equivalent of

test-driven development: the proof is the test, and the finding does not exist until it passes.

Violating the letter of this rule is violating its spirit.

The three tiers

• [CONFIRMED] — impact demonstrated AND grounded in an evidence artifact that exists on disk.
• [POSSIBLE] — reachable but the class proof bar is not yet met. Keep digging; do not report as real.
• [INFO] — true but no security impact at the claimed severity.

The proof bar (per class)

A status code is not impact. See skills/references/finding-evidence-standards.md:

SSRF needs the internal response; IDOR needs another principal's data; RCE needs command output;

XSS needs script execution; open redirect needs an external destination.

Required mechanical gate

Before any finding is recorded or reported:

1. Set the structured proof signal and run

python skills/vulnerability-analysis/scripts/validate_findings.py --findings f.json --evidence ./evidence

— it rejects ungrounded findings and per-class false positives.

1. Pass it through the REQUIRED finding-validator agent (PASS / KILL / DOWNGRADE).
2. Only a [CONFIRMED] survivor goes in the report. Severity must match what was demonstrated (CVSS honest).

See skills/references/finding-validation-runtime.md for the 7-question gate.

Read-first, never name-guess

If a function calls another, read the callee — do not infer what it does from its name.

sanitize(), is_safe(), validate_input() are exactly where vulnerabilities hide; a name is a

claim by the author, not evidence. The same applies to a config key, a decorator, or a CVE title:

open the thing before you reason about it. An unread dependency in a data-flow claim is a hole.

Quote-grounded confidence tiers

Every claim in a finding carries a confidence grounded in what you can quote, not in how it feels:

• High — a direct quote from the artifact (the exact source line, the response body, the

decompiled instruction) supports the claim.

• Medium — an explicitly stated assumption bridges a gap you could not directly observe.

State the assumption; do not hide it.

• Low — an inference you are flagging as unverified. Acceptable to record, never to report as

fact.

This is orthogonal to the [CONFIRMED]/[POSSIBLE]/[INFO] tier (which is about impact); confidence

is about how well-grounded the claim is. A High-confidence claim of a Low-impact bug is still Low.

Red Flags — STOP, downgrade to [POSSIBLE]

• "I'm sure it's exploitable" (but haven't shown impact)
• "The payload reflected, so it's XSS" / "I got a 200, so it works"
• "The DNS callback fired" (SSRF with no internal response)
• "I changed the id and got data" (but it was my own — self-IDOR)
• "It probably works on a real target" (default-deployment unproven)

All of these mean: it is [POSSIBLE], not [CONFIRMED]. Get the evidence.

Rationalizations

| Excuse | Reality |

|--------|---------|

| "Pattern-matched, clearly vulnerable" | Pattern ≠ exploit. Demonstrate impact or it's POSSIBLE. |

| "I'll attach evidence later" | No artifact on disk = ungrounded = REJECTED now. |

| "Blind RCE counts" | No output / no OOB confirmation = POSSIBLE, not CONFIRMED. |

| "Severity is obviously Critical" | CVSS must reflect demonstrated impact, not the worst case. |

| "The validator is overkill here" | Untested findings are how false positives ship. Run it. |

| "The function is called sanitize, so it's safe" | A name is the author's claim, not proof. Read the callee. |

| "The solver timed out, so it's not exploitable" | A tool limit is feasibility:null (manual), never false. |

A short list of CONFIRMED findings beats a long list of POSSIBLEs. Killing a false positive is success.