T09 · Insecure Skill Coding Practices
- Location
SKILL.md:67- Finding
Automatic Plaintext Persistence of Potentially Sensitive User Details
- Content
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- Remediation
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Security audit
Security checks for vulnerabilities and agentic risk
This memory skill openly tries to persist and reload agent context, but it does so automatically and too broadly for private user details.
Install only if you deliberately want automatic local memory. Before using it, add your own rules requiring consent, excluding secrets and sensitive personal data, limiting which files may be read, and providing a way to inspect, redact, and delete stored memory.
SKILL.md:67Automatic Plaintext Persistence of Potentially Sensitive User Details
SKILL.md:111Unconditional Startup Access to Identity and Historical Memory Files
The WAL design requires persisting concrete user details immediately and repeatedly across sessions, but it does not restrict sensitive categories or define retention boundaries. In practice, that can cause accumulation of personal data, corrections, locations, names, and other private details beyond what is necessary for task completion.
The skill instructs the agent to create and automatically update a persistent workspace file with user-provided details before responding, but it provides no user notice, consent flow, or sensitivity limits. This creates a real privacy and data-governance risk because personal or confidential information may be stored durably and accessed later without the user's awareness.
The recovery and startup instructions tell the agent to automatically read identity and memory files without permission to reconstruct context. This increases exposure of stored private data because the agent may pull in unrelated historical or identity information simply because a trigger fired, not because the user authorized or needed it for the current request.
The startup sequence directs the agent to automatically read SESSION-STATE.md, identity files, and recent memory files on every session, explicitly saying not to ask permission. This is dangerous because it normalizes silent access to potentially sensitive local data and may expose prior-session personal information unrelated to the current task.
The memory flush protocol encourages writing 'everything important' and producing comprehensive handoffs as context grows, which promotes over-collection and persistence of user information. Without sensitivity filters, this can capture excessive personal, confidential, or irrelevant data and make later exposure more harmful.
No suspicious patterns detected.