Tradecraft & OPSEC

DO and DON’T principles for autonomous red team operation — codified into Decepticon’s middleware.

Tradecraft is the techniques and procedures of espionage — used in red teaming interchangeably with TTPs. OPSEC (Operational Security) is the discipline of identifying critical information and controlling whether your actions can be observed by the adversary (in our case, the blue team).

Decepticon does not treat tradecraft as a postscript. The DO and DON’T principles below are codified into agent middleware, skill defaults, and the bash tool’s prompt detection — so the agent operates the way a competent human red teamer would, by default.

DO

Log everything

Every command, every output, every finding — to PostgreSQL, with engagement tag and timestamp. No silent actions.

Consult skills before execution

The SKILL-FIRST rule: agents must load the relevant skill before acting on a matching trigger. Skills carry tradecraft warnings inline.

Understand tool artifacts

Each skill documents what artifacts the tool leaves — registry keys, log entries, parent-process anomalies — so OPSEC tradeoffs are explicit.

Minimize C2 callbacks

Tier C2 by exposure. Long-haul callbacks for persistence, short-haul for active objectives, interactive only when needed.

Situational awareness post-access

After every initial access or pivot, run lightweight enumeration before noisy actions. Know the host before you make noise on it.

Built-ins before binaries

Prefer PowerShell, bash, and OS utilities to dropped binaries. Smaller artifact footprint, fewer EDR signals.

DON’T

Use untested tools on targets

Decepticon’s skills only reference tools that have been validated in the sandbox. Novel binaries are an OPSEC failure waiting to happen.

Use unencrypted C2

Sliver channels default to mTLS, HTTPS, or DNS. Plaintext C2 is forbidden by default in every Decepticon profile.

Execute from non-standard paths

Drop into %TEMP% or unwritable system directories with care — these are the first paths defenders look at. Skills steer toward expected locations.

Exfiltrate PII / HIPAA / PCI

The EngagementContext middleware refuses objectives that would exfiltrate regulated data. Proof-of-access is not proof-of-exfil.

Skip deconfliction calls

If the operator pauses the engagement, the agent halts new objective scheduling. Deconfliction overrides momentum.

Operate outside the RoE

The EngagementContextMiddleware checks every iteration against the RoE. Out-of-scope actions are refused, not warned.

How Tradecraft Is Codified

These principles are not aspirational — they are middleware.

Principle	Enforcement Mechanism
Log everything	All tool calls persisted via the bash tool’s tier-1 capture, then to PostgreSQL
RoE compliance	EngagementContextMiddleware injects RoE/ConOps into every LLM call and rejects out-of-scope actions
OPSEC defaults	Skill frontmatter metadata.opsec_level informs the orchestrator of risk tier per action
C2 tier discipline	OPPLAN objectives carry c2_tier (INTERACTIVE, SHORT_HAUL, LONG_HAUL); orchestrator enforces use
Built-ins first	The shared/opsec skill is loaded by default and steers agents toward LOLBins and OS utilities
Deconfliction	CLI pause primitive halts new objective scheduling without tearing down sessions

Tradecraft and the Threat Profile

Tradecraft is not generic — it is profile-specific. AUTOBANK’s tradecraft is loud-and-fast (financially motivated, smash-and-grab); CYBERSNAKE’s is slow-and-patient (espionage). Decepticon enforces the active profile’s tradecraft, not an abstract ideal.

When the orchestrator schedules an objective, it asks: “Would the threat actor in our profile do this, this way, at this cadence?” If the answer is no, the objective is reframed or rejected.

The DO/DON’T taxonomy is adapted from redteam.guide’s tradecraft page. Decepticon’s contribution is enforcement — moving the principles from a checklist to runtime middleware.

OPPLAN System

How OPPLAN objectives carry the tradecraft constraints into agent execution.