Engagement Profiles

Overview

Not every engagement needs a full-throttle assault, and not every target tolerates noisy scanning. PortShim's three engagement profiles control timing, parallelism, service probing depth, and exploit aggression — set once and the pipeline honours it through every phase.

Silent Entry

Best for: Stealth assessments, red team recon, or targets with active monitoring.

• nmap timing: -T2 (polite) with 5s delay between probes
• Parallelism: Single-target sequential scanning
• Service probes: Minimal — port and service detection only
• Exploitation: Passive credential checks only
• Nuclei: Severity critical/high only
• Duration: Slowest — designed for overnight or multi-day engagements

Surgical

Best for: Standard pentests, compliance assessments, and internal network audits.

• nmap timing: -T4 (aggressive) with default timing
• Parallelism: 5 hosts at a time
• Service probes: Full — OS detection, versioning, traceroute
• Exploitation: Hydra on common protocols (SSH, RDP, HTTP basic auth, telnet)
• Nuclei: All severities
• Duration: Balances coverage with time — typical /24 in 2–4 hours

Full Assault

Best for: Intensive vuln assessments, in-scope critical infrastructure testing, and maximum-coverage scenarios.

• nmap timing: -T5 (insane) with no delay
• Parallelism: Unlimited — scans all targets concurrently
• Service probes: Everything — OS, version, script scans, traceroute, and all NSE
• Exploitation: Full — hydra, paramiko automation, service-specific exploits
• Nuclei: Full template set including intrusive probes
• Duration: Fastest — typical /24 in 30–60 minutes

Profile Configuration

Set the profile once per engagement in the Phase 0 scope configuration:

portshim config set engagement.profile surgical
portshim start

The profile persists across all phases. Change mid-engagement via portshim config set engagement.profile full-assault at any gate.

Per-Phase Model Selection

Each profile assigns recommended LLM models per phase automatically. You can override any phase's model:

portshim config set phase.recon.model Qwen3-Coder-30B
portshim config set phase.exploit.model SuperGemma4-26B