T09 · Insecure Skill Coding Practices
Warning
- Location
SKILL.md:27- Finding
Plaintext Persistence of Minors' Educational Data
- Content
View full analysis
- Remediation
View remediation
Security audit
School
Security checks for vulnerabilities and agentic risk
Overview
The skill is a coherent K-12 tutoring helper, but it asks agents to store sensitive information about children while making security and privacy promises that the artifacts do not implement.
Review before installing. This skill may help organize tutoring, homework, and exam preparation, but it is designed to retain sensitive child learning records locally. Do not rely on its claims of encryption or parent-only access unless the hosting app separately provides those controls, and avoid storing school names, detailed session history, emotional disclosures, or other sensitive child data by default.
Vulnerability Patterns
- Insecure Skill Coding PracticesFinds exploitable flaws such as hardcoded secrets or command injection
- Skill Instruction HijackingAlters the agent's session goals or safety constraints when the skill loads
- Agent Memory PoisoningWrites attacker-controlled rules into memory that affect later sessions
- Remote Payload Retrieval and ExecutionFetches external code whose behavior can change after review
- Embedded Malicious CodeShips malicious scripts inside the skill and executes them locally
Findings (1)
Vulnerability Patterns
- Prompt InjectionInstruction Override, Hidden Instructions, Exfiltration Commands
- Data ExfiltrationExternal Transmission, Env Variable Harvesting, File System Enumeration
- Trigger AbuseOverly Broad Trigger, Shadow Command Trigger, Keyword Baiting Trigger
- Privilege EscalationExcessive Permissions, Sudo/Root Execution, Credential Access
- Supply ChainUnpinned Dependencies, External Script Fetching, Obfuscated Code
Findings (7)
Vague Triggers
Medium
- Category
- Not specified by scanner
- Confidence
- 88% confidence
- Finding
The skill's activation criteria are very broad, covering generic requests like supporting a child's education, homework help, exam preparation, and progress tracking across ages 3-18 and any curriculum. This can cause the skill to trigger on a wide range of ordinary educational conversations, increasing the chance of unintended invocation, inappropriate data handling, or bypass of more specialized safeguards in other skills.
- Content
Missing User Warnings
Medium
- Category
- Not specified by scanner
- Confidence
- 89% confidence
- Finding
The skill explicitly encourages sharing a young child’s learning summaries with parents but does not define any privacy boundaries, consent model, retention limits, or handling for sensitive disclosures. In a K-12 context involving minors, normalizing routine reporting without safeguards can lead to over-collection or inappropriate disclosure of educational and behavioral data.
- Content
Missing User Warnings
Medium
- Category
- Not specified by scanner
- Confidence
- 91% confidence
- Finding
Weekly progress summaries, difficulty areas, reinforcement suggestions, and time-spent metrics create a structured flow of student performance data to parents, but the document omits any warning about privacy implications or data minimization. For school-age minors, this can expose sensitive educational profiling data and create unclear expectations about monitoring and access.
- Content
Missing User Warnings
Medium
- Category
- Not specified by scanner
- Confidence
- 90% confidence
- Finding
The middle-school section says parents can see time, subjects, and progress while conversation details remain hidden, but it does not explain the privacy model, escalation criteria, or consent boundaries. This partial-visibility design can still reveal sensitive behavioral and academic patterns about minors without adequate transparency or limitation.
- Content
Missing User Warnings
Medium
- Category
- Not specified by scanner
- Confidence
- 93% confidence
- Finding
Advertising a 'private mode' for sensitive topics while also promising parent-facing summaries is especially risky because it may create misleading expectations of confidentiality for minors. If privacy boundaries, exceptions, and emergency/safety escalation rules are not clearly defined, students may disclose sensitive mental-health, identity, or stress-related information believing it is private when it may still be inferred or shared.
- Content
Missing User Warnings
Medium
- Category
- Not specified by scanner
- Confidence
- 85% confidence
- Finding
The document states that child learning progress, session history, and preferences are stored, but it does not clearly disclose the privacy risks of retaining minors' interaction data or explain retention scope, duration, and potential sensitivity of that history. In a K-12 child-focused product, session history can contain sensitive behavioral, emotional, or safety-related disclosures, so incomplete notice and governance around retention increases privacy and compliance risk.
- Content
Missing User Warnings
Medium
- Category
- Not specified by scanner
- Confidence
- 92% confidence
- Finding
The skill explicitly instructs recording per-session learner details, difficulty areas, breakthroughs, homework completion, and parent-facing summaries without any guardrails for minimizing, securing, or appropriately handling potentially sensitive student data. In a K-12 context, this is more dangerous because the data concerns minors and could reveal academic weaknesses, behavioral patterns, and progress information that should be treated with heightened privacy care.
- Content
Static analysis
No suspicious patterns detected.