What you are going to build

Garak is a scanner. You point it at something that answers prompts, it sends a few hundred of them, and it tells you which answers were a problem. This course scans one support assistant, and every lesson runs on your machine with no API key.

You already test what your assistant does when a customer asks a normal question. A scanner asks the other questions: the confusing ones, the ones with instructions hidden in them, the ones designed to make it say something it should not.

Point garak only at systems you are allowed to test. That means your own application, in your own environment, with the people responsible for it aware that it is happening. This course scans a Python function you wrote, which is the safest possible target.

A scan, working

Example

garak -t function -n support_bot#reply --spec probes.test.Blank --report_prefix scan

One probe, five prompts, and a verdict with a number on it. The bot under test is an ordinary Python function, which is the point: garak scans whatever answers, and it does not care whether a model is involved.

What the pieces are called

Piece	What it does	Lesson
Generator	The thing being scanned. Yours is a Python function	4
Probe	Where the prompts come from	7
Detector	Decides whether an answer was a problem	11
Attempt	One prompt, its answers, and what the detectors said	14
Report	A JSON line per attempt, kept for later	14
Buff	Rewrites prompts before they are sent	17
Attack success rate	The share of answers that were a problem	16

Where the course goes

What you need

Python 3.10 or newer, and pip install garak.
No key and no account. Every scan here runs against your own code.
A terminal.

Try it yourself

Read the table and pick the row you most want to understand.
Write down one thing your own assistant must never say. That is a detector, in lesson 13.

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