Technology
How ROOTVIEL works
ROOTVIEL is a verifiable multi-agent system. Agents reason and coordinate; a deterministic layer decides what is authorized and what is proven. Below is the cognitive cycle at a glance, then the articles that go deep.
Not a scanner — the cognitive cycle
Read the full article →- 1Observe the target and build context
- 2Maintain beliefs, goals and intentions
- 3Form and rank hypotheses — deterministically
- 4Select the next action by information gain
- 5Authorize through the tool gate (security first)
- 6Act, and observe the result as evidence
- 7Verify the evidence with a deterministic verifier
- 8Replan on the evidence
- 9Leave what is unproven as UNKNOWN
- 10A human reviews and validates the result
// budget exhausted → UNKNOWN, never a hopeful CONFIRMED
Not loops — guarantees
In the end, it is a guarantees problem
An LLM in a loop makes a good demo and a brittle system. What makes the system trustworthy is not autonomy — it is four guarantees, each enforced deterministically, outside the model.
Authorization
Authority lives in code, not in the model. Every tool call passes a single deny-by-default gate that reads capabilities, never the model’s confidence. The agent cannot self-authorize.
Evidence
A finding exists only when an independent, LLM-free verifier re-derives it from an observed, unforgeable state change. "Looks vulnerable" never becomes a reported fact.
Epistemic honesty
Claims are labelled PROVEN, NOT PROVEN or UNKNOWN. What cannot be demonstrated is marked UNKNOWN — never "safe" — and a run that finds nothing never means secure.
Traceability
Every decision and action emits a tamper-evident, hash-chained record, so any result can be reconstructed with the evidence that produced it.
The loop is the easy part. These guarantees are the work — and the reason a ROOTVIEL run can be trusted where an autonomous agent, on its own, cannot. The Academy develops each one from first principles.
Two planes, one signed bus
Authority is minted in one place, executed in another
The plane allowed to authorize an active test is not the plane that runs it. They speak only through a one-way, cryptographically signed event bus — so persuading the agent, or compromising the engine, cannot forge authority.
The plane that is allowed to act is not the plane that does act. A signed order crosses the boundary one way; the engine reads the self-contained message and never calls back. The agent cannot skip the gate or self-authorize, a blocked action is never counted as work, and a claim only becomes a Finding once a deterministic verifier and the membrane promote it — otherwise it stays UNKNOWN.
Deep dives
The mechanisms, in detail
The cognitive cycle, the evidence model, the two-plane signed architecture and deterministic enforcement — each written to teach the mechanism.
Not a scanner: the cognitive cycle of a security agent
A scanner runs a fixed sequence and reports possibilities. A ROOTVIEL agent runs a stateful investigation — it observes, forms beliefs, tests hypotheses under a deterministic gate, and stops honestly.
Read articleEvidence, not opinion: PROVEN, NOT PROVEN, UNKNOWN
A model saying "this looks vulnerable" must never become a reported fact. ROOTVIEL separates who proposes from who verifies from who decides what crosses — and keeps "unknown" visibly distinct from "fine".
Read articleTwo planes, one signed bus
The system that authorizes active security tests must not be the system that executes them. ROOTVIEL splits control from execution and lets them speak only through a bus of cryptographically signed events.
Read articleAgentic orchestration, deterministic enforcement
Agents reason and replan; that is non-deterministic by nature. Authority must not be. ROOTVIEL keeps the power to act outside the model, as deny-by-default rules a human can read.
Read articleThe signed order protocol
The control plane never executes — it mints signed authority. A look at the self-sufficient, Ed25519-signed envelope that authorizes an assessment, how it is canonicalized, how it expires, and the fail-closed gate that checks it.
Read article