Technologies

What a technology is

A technology is something a target is built with or runs on: a language runtime (Node.js, PHP), a web server or proxy (Caddy, nginx), a datastore (PostgreSQL, Redis), a framework (Laravel, Rails), a platform (Android, Cloudflare Workers).

Why they matter

Technologies are the anchor for everything version-, configuration-, or runtime-specific. A quirk almost never applies "everywhere on the asset" — it applies to a specific technology in a specific state. Linking the technology gives those observations a place to live and gives the engine a scoping anchor.

How they link

Usually directly to the asset — a technology is a property of the thing you are testing. Behavior specific to it is captured as scoped children:

• a quirk inside the technology (Prototype pollution inside Node.js)
• a vector inside the part of the stack it affects

A quirk scoped to a technology scores more specifically than the same quirk floating on the asset, and playbooks that require the pairing can only match when the structure is right.

Library hygiene

One entry per technology, kept stable and undated. Node.js is knowledge you keep forever; prototype pollution is a quirk scoped to it; the version condition is a detail on that observation. When you are tempted to create "Apache 2.4.49 path traversal" as a technology, you are really looking at three separate components.

What's next

Functionalities — what the stack does for users.