bastionskill

Static scanner for skill-poisoning. Point it at an agent skill (a SKILL.md plus its bundled scripts) and it inspects the bundled executable code for malicious behavior — then reports the shadow: what the code does that the skill's description never declared.

Agent skills bundle scripts that run when the skill is invoked, and can install hooks that run afterward. That is an arbitrary-code-execution surface. bastionskill is the code-layer leg of the bastion suite; the prompt-layer (malicious SKILL.md text) is bastionsupply's job.

Install

pip install bastionskill
# optional: full prompt-layer scanning via bastionsupply
pip install "bastionskill[prompt]"

Zero required dependencies. Python 3.10+.

Use

bastionskill scan ./some-skill              # scan a local skill dir
bastionskill scan ~/.claude/skills          # batch-scan every skill under a dir
bastionskill scan owner/repo                # pre-flight a REMOTE skill (shallow clone, no exec)
bastionskill scan https://github.com/o/r    #   ... by full URL
bastionskill scan ./skill --prompt          # + hidden-unicode / prompt-layer
bastionskill scan ./skill --json            # machine-readable
bastionskill scan ./skill --report out.json # signable manifest (per-file hashes, verdict)
bastionskill scan ./skill --record          # append result to the local ledger
bastionskill scan ./skill --fail-on block   # CI gate: block|review|none (default: review)
bastionskill harden ./skill -o skill-policy.yaml   # agentbastion/bastiongate policy
bastionskill ledger                         # list previously scanned skills + dates

Verdict, not a wall of severities

The scan ends in one of three verdicts, because capability is not malice — a legit power-tool exercises network, secrets, and hooks too:

• allow — clean, or capability the skill legitimately has (even a lot of it).
• review — a poisoning signal a human should eyeball: a shadow (the code exercises a capability SKILL.md never declared), obfuscation, an opaque binary, or the exfil pattern (reads secrets and has egress).
• block — hard malice with no honest use: a staged-exec (decode piped to a shell).

Capability findings are reported as informational context, not as blockers. --fail-on (block|review|none, default review) is the CI gate. See docs/github-action.md.

Remote pre-flight shallow-clones the repo to a temp dir, scans statically, and deletes it. The skill's own code is never executed.

Ledger & rug-pull. --record writes each scan to ~/.bastionskill/ledger.jsonl (source, content hash, date, verdict). Re-scan the same source after it changes and you get a ! DRIFT warning — the poisoned-update vector.

What it catches (code-layer)

Python files get a real ast pass (stdlib) on top of regex, so dynamic exec / import / attribute-built calls survive reflow. Bash and JS use regex heuristics.

Findings are reported regardless of dead-code or if False: / env-flag guards — the scanner reads source, it never runs it, and malware hides behind guards too.

How it fits the suite

• Prompt-layer → bastionsupply (dependency, optional extra)
• Runtime gating → bastiongate
• harden emits an agentbastion / bastiongate skill policy (allow/deny + blocked capabilities)

Test fixture

The inert, defanged demo skill this scanner is built against lives at Rinkia/poisoned-skill-demo — a "markdown formatter" that actually exfiltrates and installs a hook. See its EXPECTED.md for the findings oracle.

bastionskill scan Rinkia/poisoned-skill-demo   # scan the demo straight off GitHub

License

MIT © 2026 Stefano Rizzello