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Shannon - AI Penetration Testing Framework

Shannon is your fully autonomous AI pentester

Shannon’s job is simple: break your web app before anyone else does. The Red Team to your vibe-coding Blue team. Every Claude (coder) deserves their Shannon.
Shannon Lite achieves a 96.15% success rate on a hint-free, source-aware XBOW benchmark.

What is Shannon?

Shannon is an AI pentester that delivers actual exploits, not just alerts. Shannon’s goal is to break your web app before someone else does. It autonomously hunts for attack vectors in your code, then uses its built-in browser to execute real exploits, such as injection attacks, and auth bypass, to prove the vulnerability is actually exploitable.

What problem does Shannon solve?

Thanks to tools like Claude Code and Cursor, your team ships code non-stop. But your penetration test? That happens once a year. This creates a massive security gap. For the other 364 days, you could be unknowingly shipping vulnerabilities to production. Shannon closes this gap by acting as your on-demand whitebox pentester. It doesn’t just find potential issues. It executes real exploits, providing concrete proof of vulnerabilities. This lets you ship with confidence, knowing every build can be secured.
Shannon is a core component of the Keygraph Security and Compliance Platform. While Shannon automates the critical task of penetration testing for your application, the broader platform automates your entire compliance journey—from evidence collection to audit readiness.

Key features

Fully autonomous operation

Launch the pentest with a single command. The AI handles everything from advanced 2FA/TOTP logins (including sign in with Google) and browser navigation to the final report with zero intervention.

Pentester-grade reports

Delivers a final report focused on proven, exploitable findings, complete with copy-and-paste Proof-of-Concepts to eliminate false positives and provide actionable results.

Critical OWASP coverage

Currently identifies and validates the following critical vulnerabilities: Injection, XSS, SSRF, and Broken Authentication/Authorization, with more types in development.

Code-aware dynamic testing

Analyzes your source code to intelligently guide its attack strategy, then performs live, browser and command line based exploits on the running application to confirm real-world risk.

Integrated security tools

Enhances its discovery phase by leveraging leading reconnaissance and testing tools—including Nmap, Subfinder, WhatWeb, and Schemathesis—for deep analysis of the target environment.

Parallel processing

Get your report faster. The system parallelizes the most time-intensive phases, running analysis and exploitation for all vulnerability types concurrently.

Real results

Shannon discovered 20+ critical vulnerabilities in OWASP Juice Shop, including complete auth bypass and database exfiltration.

OWASP Juice Shop

20+ high-impact vulnerabilities including complete authentication bypass and database exfiltration

c{api}tal API

15+ critical vulnerabilities leading to full application compromise

OWASP crAPI

15+ critical vulnerabilities achieving full database compromise via advanced JWT attacks

Product editions

Shannon is available in two editions:
EditionLicenseBest For
Shannon LiteAGPL-3.0Security teams, independent researchers, testing your own applications
Shannon ProCommercialEnterprises requiring advanced features, CI/CD integration, and dedicated support
White-box only. Shannon Lite is designed for white-box (source-available) application security testing. It expects access to your application’s source code and repository layout.

Get started

Quickstart

Get Shannon running and execute your first pentest in minutes

Installation

Detailed installation instructions and platform-specific setup

Configuration

Configure authentication, 2FA, and custom testing parameters

Architecture

Learn how Shannon’s multi-agent system works under the hood

How Shannon works

Shannon emulates a human penetration tester’s methodology using a sophisticated multi-agent architecture:

Five-phase pipeline

1

Pre-Reconnaissance

External scans (nmap, subfinder, whatweb) + source code analysis
2

Reconnaissance

Attack surface mapping from initial findings
3

Vulnerability analysis

5 parallel agents hunt for injection, XSS, auth, authz, and SSRF vulnerabilities
4

Exploitation

5 parallel agents execute real exploits to confirm vulnerabilities
5

Reporting

Executive-level security report with reproducible proof-of-concepts
Shannon enforces a strict “No Exploit, No Report” policy. If a hypothesis cannot be successfully exploited to demonstrate impact, it is discarded as a false positive.

Community and support

Discord

Join the community for real-time support

GitHub Issues

Report bugs and request features

Documentation

Explore the full Keygraph platform

Build docs developers (and LLMs) love