Vulkro Inspect - malicious-code capability surface
Vulkro Inspect reads just-cloned first-party source for author-planted malice, where the author of the repository is the adversary rather than a remote attacker. It answers one question: what can this code do on my machine if I run it, and which lines should I read before I do.
What Vulkro detects
The MAL-* rules below each emit an evidence signal beginning with mal-. A capability projector groups those findings into behaviour buckets for the vulkro inspect view and the inspect_repo MCP tool: trojan source, shell or backdoor shapes, credential access, credential exfiltration, install hooks, obfuscation, environment-gated execution, self-propagation, wallet access, remote code load, persistence, committed binaries, dependency integrity, and prompt injection aimed at an AI agent. Any new mal- signal falls into an Other bucket rather than silently disappearing.
What Inspect never does: it never certifies code safe. There is no clean, pass, or approved state anywhere in the surface, no reassuring zero-count message, and no machine-actionable proceed verb. Every report carries this disclosure verbatim: This is a static scan of code that has not run, over source an author may have crafted to evade it: it surfaces behaviors for a human to review and can never certify the code free of malicious behavior.
The proximity rules are honest about their own limits. Several detectors score a shape by finding two tokens within a small window of source lines in the same file. That is co-location, not dataflow: it shows both capabilities are present and adjacent, not that bytes flow from one to the other. Comments are blanked before matching so a security note in prose does not score as code.
Remediation. Treat every hit as a read-this-line prompt, not a verdict. Open the file, decide whether the behaviour has a legitimate reason to exist in this repository, and do not run install scripts or build steps until you have.
See also
- Confidence model - what
High,Medium, andLowmean for findings in this category. - Safety - what Vulkro does and does not access on your machine.
References
This page is generated by vulkro rules export <out-dir> from Vulkro's built-in detector catalogue. Edits made by hand are overwritten on the next regeneration.