effector-audit

Security audit and cryptographic signing for AI agent capabilities.

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The Trust Crisis

On February 18, 2026, Snyk published the ToxicSkills Report. The findings were severe: 36% of ClawHub skills contained prompt injection or malicious payloads. The ClawHavoc campaign had planted 1,184+ malicious skills targeting developers. Trend Micro confirmed distribution of the Atomic macOS Stealer through community-published skills. Microsoft, Cisco, and 1Password all published independent analyses confirming the systemic nature of the threat.

The root cause wasn't a bug. It was an architectural absence: no code signing, no security review, no formal permission model for AI agent capabilities. Anyone could publish a skill to ClawHub. Everyone had to trust it blindly.

This is npm circa 2018 — before npm audit, before lockfiles, before Sigstore. Except the stakes are higher, because AI agent capabilities don't just run code. They control what an AI does in the world: reading your files, calling APIs, sending messages, modifying databases.

effector-audit closes this gap.

What It Does

1. Static Analysis

Scans Effector packages for known vulnerability patterns:

npx effector-audit scan ./my-skill/

  ✗ CRITICAL  prompt-injection    Line 23: System prompt override detected
  ✗ HIGH      data-exfiltration   Line 47: Unscoped network access to external domain
  ⚠ MEDIUM    permission-creep    Requests filesystem write but description says "read-only"
  ✓ PASS      dependency-check    All dependencies are signed and verified
  ✓ PASS      type-safety         Interface types match declared contract

  2 critical, 1 warning — audit failed

Detection patterns include:

• Prompt injection and jailbreak attempts in SKILL.md content
• Permission declarations that exceed described functionality
• Data exfiltration vectors (unscoped network, filesystem access)
• Dependency vulnerabilities (transitive risk analysis)
• Type contract violations (declared interface vs. actual behavior)
• Obfuscated instructions (base64, unicode tricks, invisible text)

2. Cryptographic Signing

Sign Effector packages with Sigstore — the same infrastructure securing npm, PyPI, and Homebrew:

# Sign with your identity (keyless, tied to OIDC identity)
npx effector-audit sign ./my-skill/

  ✓ Signed by: developer@example.com
  ✓ Transparency log: rekor.sigstore.dev/e/12345
  ✓ Signature: effector.sig (detached, verifiable)

# Verify before installing
npx effector-audit verify ./downloaded-skill/

  ✓ Signed by: developer@example.com (verified via Fulcio)
  ✓ Signature valid, not tampered
  ✓ Timestamp: 2026-03-10T14:32:00Z (Rekor logged)

No PGP keys to manage. No key servers. Identity-based signing through existing GitHub/Google/Microsoft accounts, backed by certificate transparency logs.

3. Permission Verification

Cross-references declared permissions against actual capability behavior:

npx effector-audit permissions ./my-skill/

  Declared permissions:
    ✓ read:repository
    ✓ network:api.github.com

  Detected behavior:
    ✓ read:repository        (Line 12: uses gh api repos/...)
    ✗ network:slack.com      (Line 34: curl to Slack webhook — NOT DECLARED)
    ✗ write:filesystem       (Line 45: writes to /tmp — NOT DECLARED)

  Permission drift detected: 2 undeclared capabilities

4. Supply Chain Verification

Verify the entire dependency tree:

npx effector-audit supply-chain ./my-workflow/

  Dependencies:
    ├── code-review@1.2.0      ✓ signed (effectorHQ)
    ├── security-scan@2.0.0    ✓ signed (snyk-community)
    ├── slack-notify@0.5.0     ⚠ unsigned (community)
    └── custom-formatter@0.1.0 ✗ unverified (no provenance)

  Trust chain: 2/4 verified, 1 unsigned, 1 unverified
  Recommendation: Pin custom-formatter to exact version, request signing

Why This Matters Now

The attack surface for AI agent capabilities is unique and growing:

Attack vector	Traditional software	AI agent capabilities
Code injection	Runs in sandbox	Controls AI behavior — acts with user's permissions
Dependency confusion	Installs wrong package	Teaches AI wrong skills — behavioral corruption
Permission escalation	OS-level containment	No standard permission model — skills do whatever they want
Supply chain	Lock files, SBOMs	No signing, no provenance, no verification

The February 2026 ClawHub crisis was the "left-pad moment" for AI capabilities — except instead of broken builds, the consequence was compromised agents exfiltrating data and installing malware.

Research supports this urgency:

• Vercel's analysis found that reducing to the right tools matters more than adding more tools — bad tools create infinite loops and cascading failures (Vercel Security Boundaries, 2026)
• The ACNBP framework (arXiv:2506.13590) proposed capability attestation for multi-agent systems — effector-audit provides the concrete implementation
• Defense-in-depth architectures now require app-level sandboxing + secret injection as standard practice (NVIDIA Sandboxing Guidance, 2026)

Integration

GitHub Action

- uses: effectorHQ/effector-audit-action@v1
  with:
    path: ./skills/
    fail-on: critical
    verify-signatures: true

CI/CD Pipeline

# In your publish pipeline
effector-audit scan . && effector-audit sign . && npm publish

Registry Gate

effector-audit is designed to be a registry gate — ClawHub, MCP Registry, or any future capability registry can require signed, audited Effectors before listing them.

Architecture

effector-audit
├── scanner/          # Static analysis engine
│   ├── rules/        # Detection rules (prompt injection, exfiltration, etc.)
│   ├── analyzer.js   # AST + content analysis for SKILL.md and code
│   └── reporter.js   # Output formatting (terminal, JSON, SARIF)
├── signer/           # Sigstore integration
│   ├── sign.js       # Keyless signing via Fulcio
│   ├── verify.js     # Signature verification via Rekor
│   └── bundle.js     # Signature bundling in effector.toml
├── permissions/       # Permission analysis
│   ├── declared.js   # Parse permission declarations from manifest
│   ├── detected.js   # Detect actual behavior from content analysis
│   └── diff.js       # Permission drift detection
└── supply-chain/     # Dependency tree verification
    ├── resolve.js    # Dependency resolution
    ├── verify.js     # Transitive trust verification
    └── sbom.js       # Software Bill of Materials generation

Roadmap

• v0.1 — Core scanner with prompt injection + exfiltration detection, CLI output
• v0.2 — Sigstore signing + verification, GitHub Action
• v0.3 — Permission analysis, drift detection
• v0.4 — Supply chain verification, SBOM generation
• v0.5 — Integration with effector-types (type contract verification)
• v1.0 — Production-ready, registry-gate capable

Contributing

Security tooling needs adversarial thinking. We especially need:

• New detection rules — Found a new attack pattern? Submit a rule
• False positive reports — If the scanner flags legitimate patterns, we need to know
• Registry integration — Help us build gates for ClawHub, MCP Registry, and others
• Signing UX — Make signing as frictionless as possible for capability authors

License

MIT

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_{Part of the effectorHQ studio. We build hands for AI.}