The PIE Engine

The five phases

A full pentest (PIE Deep) runs five phases, each a separate durable step with its own timeout and retry policy. Basic scans run attack-surface discovery only (subdomains, ports, services, technologies, TLS), with no vulnerability hunting or exploitation.

1 · Reconnaissance      map the exposed surface
2 · Attack surface      enumerate endpoints & params
3 · Active testing      agents selected by scope
4 · Verification        exploit proof + impact evidence where the RoE allows;
                        the rest is marked suspected
5 · PIE intelligence    risk narrative, remediation + report

Durability

The pipeline runs on a durable workflow engine. If a worker crashes or a tool times out mid-scan, execution resumes from the phase that was running instead of starting over.

Coverage

Coverage depends on the scan type, your plan and the signed scope: blackbox (external) testing, and graybox (authenticated) testing including Active Directory. See Compliance mapping for how findings translate to frameworks.