T05 · Unauthorized Access and Privilege Escalation
- Location
SKILL.md:229- Finding
Unsafe Recommendation to Run the Workflow with Administrator Privileges
- Content
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Vulnerability Details
File Location:
SKILL.md, line 229
Vulnerability Type: Unnecessary privilege escalation through unsafe troubleshooting guidance
Risk Level: MediumSource excerpt translated into English:
markdown | Insufficient permissions | The current user lacks read/write permissions | Check file permissions and run as administrator |Technical Analysis
The troubleshooting guidance recommends running the workflow as an administrator whenever the current account lacks file read or write permission. This grants the complete agent workflow, document parsers, report generator, and any future implementation substantially more authority than is legitimately required to process a user-selected financial report.
Administrator execution is not an appropriate general solution to a filesystem permission error. The workflow should instead identify the denied path and use input and output directories owned by the current user. This recommendation also directly conflicts with the least-privilege instruction at
SKILL.md:246, which advises against running as root or administrator.The package contains no executable analyzer script, so the audit did not confirm that privilege escalation is performed automatically or that malicious code currently exploits the elevated context. Exploitation depends on a user following the documented recommendation while running an eventual or separately obtained analyzer implementation.
Attack Path
- An attacker provides a crafted financial document, malicious parser input, or output path that causes a permission-denied error.
- The workflow reports insufficient filesystem permissions.
- The user follows the troubleshooting guidance at line 229 and reruns the agent or analyzer with administrator privileges.
- The analyzer and all document-processing dependencies execute in the elevated context.
- If any component contains malicious behavior or a document-par ...[truncated 881 chars]
- Remediation
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Remediation Suggestions
- Remove the recommendation to run the workflow as an administrator.
- Report the exact input or output path for which access was denied.
- Require inputs and generated reports to reside in directories owned by the current user.
- Validate and canonicalize user-supplied paths before file access, and reject paths outside explicitly approved working directories.
- Grant only narrowly scoped filesystem permissions to the affected file or directory when access is genuinely required.
- Run PDF and spreadsheet parsing in a sandbox with restricted filesystem, process, and network access.
- Keep the agent and all analyzer subprocesses under a non-administrative account.
- Add an explicit failure mode instructing users to contact a system administrator rather than elevating the entire workflow.
- Reconcile the troubleshooting section with the least-privilege requirement at line 246.