Vulnerability Signature Framework
Seven families. Full coverage.
Every vulnerability signature maps to a real-world attack pattern. Built from adversarial research — not theoretical frameworks, not compliance checklists, not guesswork.
Reasoning Traces
What it detects
Corrupted internal logic chains. Reasoning steps that produce dangerous outputs from seemingly valid inputs. Hidden inference errors. Logic path manipulation. Decision-tree poisoning.
Why it matters
The internal logic your agent uses to reach decisions is the foundation of everything it does. Corrupted reasoning produces dangerous outputs from seemingly valid inputs — every time, at scale.
Evaluation Frameworks
What it detects
Compromised self-evaluation mechanisms. Agents that cannot detect when they have been manipulated. Broken validation loops. False-positive success signals. Metrics that mask failure.
Why it matters
How your agent measures success and validates its own outputs determines whether it can detect manipulation. Compromised evaluation means the agent thinks it is doing the right thing. It is not.
Behavioral Drift
What it detects
Gradual deviation from intended behavior over time. Silent operational changes with no single failure event. Behavioral shifts across sessions. Policy erosion without triggering alerts.
Why it matters
Agents that slowly change how they operate without any single failure event triggering an alert are the hardest vulnerabilities to catch. Drift is silent. By the time you notice, the damage is done.
Memory Integrity
What it detects
Poisoned persistent memory. Corrupted session context. Manipulated retrieval-augmented data. Tainted conversation history. Memory injection across sessions.
Why it matters
Vulnerabilities in how agents store, retrieve, and act on persistent memory affect every future interaction. Whatever your agent remembers, an attacker can rewrite.
Agent Identity
What it detects
Identity spoofing at the agent layer. Impersonation of trusted systems. Weak or absent agent authentication. Unverified inter-agent communication. Trust chain violations.
Why it matters
Weaknesses in how your agent authenticates itself and verifies the identity of systems it interacts with create attack surfaces at every connection point. If your agent cannot verify who it is talking to, neither can you.
Kill Switches
What it detects
Agents that disable, circumvent, or ignore their own shutdown mechanisms. Degraded emergency stop functions. Override-resistant operation. Control plane disconnection.
Why it matters
The controls that stop agent operation when something goes wrong must work every time. A kill switch that does not work is not a kill switch.
Supply Chain Integrity
What it detects
Compromised plugins and community nodes. Malicious marketplace skills. Vulnerable third-party integrations. Unverified dependency chains. Tampered model weights or configurations.
Why it matters
Vulnerabilities introduced through plugins, community nodes, marketplace skills, and third-party integrations extend your attack surface beyond your control. Your agent is only as safe as everything it is connected to.
Research-driven methodology.
Every signature family is built from real adversarial research. Attack patterns observed in production systems — not hypothetical scenarios from white papers. The framework is continuously updated as new attack vectors emerge.
VANGUARD does not guess what could go wrong. It tests what does go wrong.
See the framework in action.
Try a free vulnerability scenario. Pick an attack pattern, run it against an agent, and see what VANGUARD catches.