Security audit
Security checks for vulnerabilities and agentic risk
This is a straightforward DuckDuckGo search skill; it sends search terms to DuckDuckGo as expected and shows no hidden persistence, credential access, destructive behavior, or unrelated data handling.
Install only if you are comfortable with search terms being sent to DuckDuckGo. Do not use it with passwords, private keys, confidential documents, or sensitive internal identifiers unless that disclosure is acceptable.
The skill demonstrates outbound network access but does not declare any tool scope or permission boundary. That creates a governance and least-privilege problem: an agent or reviewer cannot easily determine or constrain that the skill will transmit user-supplied queries to an external service.
The manifest description is written with very broad trigger language ('search the web', 'find information online', 'perform web-based research') that can match many ordinary user requests. In agent environments, this increases the chance of over-invocation, causing unintended external requests and unnecessary disclosure of user queries to a third party.
This code sends the user query to an external endpoint at api.duckduckgo.com, which is an external transmission of potentially sensitive input. In the context of a search skill this is expected behavior, but it still matters because prompts, internal identifiers, or confidential text could be transmitted off-platform if the skill is invoked with sensitive content.
Returns:
List of search results with title, url, description
"""
url = "https://api.duckduckgo.com/"
params = {
"q": query,
"format": "json",
Data is being sent to an external URL. This could be legitimate telemetry or data exfiltration. Manual review is recommended.
"User-Agent": user_agent or "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36"
})
self.base_url = "https://duckduckgo.com/html/"
self.json_api_url = "https://api.duckduckgo.com/"
def search(self, query: str, max_results: int = 10, delay: float = 1.0) -> List[Dict]:
"""
This code sends the user-provided query to a remote web service via HTTP POST, which can expose potentially sensitive user input outside the local environment. Although the module docstrings describe search functionality, there is no explicit user-facing warning, confirmation, or disclosure that queries will be sent over the network.
The image-search path issues multiple HTTP GET requests to DuckDuckGo using the supplied query, including token retrieval and image-result fetching. There is no visible prompt, warning, or disclosure to users that their search terms are being sent to an external service.
No suspicious patterns detected.