Static scanning

gate scan is static analysis of configuration. It reads files, classifies what it finds, and stops.

What happens

1. Discover. Every adapter that detects its ecosystem reads its configuration files.
2. Normalise. Raw config becomes GateServer structures. This is the redaction boundary: credentials are detected, classified and replaced with placeholders here, so nothing downstream ever holds a raw value.
3. Classify. Each tool and standing grant is mapped to capabilities.
4. Run rules. Every rule runs against the normalised model. A rule that throws is reported as a warning and skipped: one broken check must never take down the other twenty-one.
5. Score. The blast radius is computed from the facts.
6. Diff. If a baseline exists, findings are marked new, unchanged or resolved.

A scan of a typical repository takes well under a second.

What Gate reads

Configuration files only, inside the repository you pointed it at. Discovery walks the tree with node_modules, .git, dist, .next and similar directories skipped, and opens only files whose names suggest agent configuration.

Symbolic links are not followed. A symlink inside a scanned repository is a config-controlled path out of the root, and following one would let a repository decide what Gate reads.

What it never does

• Never spawns a process from scanned configuration.
• Never opens a network connection to a configured server.
• Never reads outside the repository root, even when a path in the configuration points there. Gate classifies ~/.ssh as a grant; it does not go and look.
• Never writes, except to .gate/baseline.json when you explicitly ask.

Connecting to servers requires deep inspection, which is opt-in.

Limits

Static analysis cannot see tools a server has but never declared in configuration. For a server Gate recognises exactly, the tool list is known. For one it does not, the finding records a capability posture and is labelled as inferred.

Hard caps keep a hostile or enormous repository from turning a scan into a denial of service:

export default defineConfig({
  limits: {
    maxFiles: 2000,
    maxFileSizeBytes: 2_000_000,
  },
})

Hitting a cap produces a warning, so a partial answer never looks like a complete one.