How SkillReg Secures Your AI Agent Workflows

AI agents executing code on your behalf is powerful — and risky. A single malicious or poorly written skill can exfiltrate secrets, delete data, or compromise your CI/CD pipeline. SkillReg is built from the ground up with security as a first-class concern.

The Threat Model

When an AI agent executes a skill, it's essentially running instructions with access to your codebase, environment variables, and often your cloud credentials. The risks include:

• Supply chain attacks — A compromised skill could inject backdoors into your code
• Secret exfiltration — Skills with network access could send your API keys to an attacker
• Destructive operations — A buggy skill could delete branches, drop databases, or corrupt files
• Privilege escalation — Skills might request more access than they need

These aren't theoretical risks. As AI agent adoption grows, so does the attack surface.

Security Scanning

Every skill pushed to SkillReg goes through automated security scanning before it's available for installation.

What We Scan For

• Dangerous patterns — Commands like rm -rf, DROP TABLE, or curl | bash trigger warnings
• Secret exposure — Hardcoded API keys, tokens, or passwords are flagged immediately
• Network calls — Outbound HTTP requests are identified and categorized
• File system access — Skills that read or write outside the project directory are flagged
• Shell injection — Patterns that could lead to command injection are detected

Severity Levels

| Level | Description | Action | |-------|-------------|--------| | Critical | Known malicious patterns | Publish blocked | | High | Dangerous operations without safeguards | Warning, manual review required | | Medium | Potentially risky patterns | Warning, published with flag | | Low | Informational findings | Published normally |

Access Control

SkillReg uses scope-based access control to ensure skills are only accessible to authorized users.

Scopes

Every skill belongs to a scope — either a personal scope or an organization scope:

# Personal scope
skillreg push @alice/deploy-script

# Organization scope
skillreg push @acme-corp/deploy-script

Permission Levels

• Owner — Full control (publish, delete, manage access)
• Maintainer — Can publish new versions
• Reader — Can install but not modify

Private by Default

All skills published to SkillReg are private by default. You must explicitly grant access to other users or make a skill public. This is the opposite of most open-source registries and reflects the reality that most enterprise skills contain proprietary logic.

Versioning as Security

Versioning isn't just about compatibility — it's a security feature.

Immutable Versions

Once a version is published, it cannot be modified or overwritten. This prevents:

• Version tampering — An attacker can't replace v1.0.0 with malicious code
• Silent updates — Teams won't unknowingly get different code for the same version

Version Pinning

Teams can pin to exact versions to prevent automatic updates:

# Always get exactly this version
skillreg pull @acme-corp/deploy-script@1.2.3

# Allow patch updates only
skillreg pull @acme-corp/deploy-script@~1.2.0

Audit Trail

Every action in SkillReg is logged:

• Who published which version, and when
• Who installed which skill
• Who changed access permissions
• Security scan results for every version

This audit trail is essential for compliance (SOC 2, ISO 27001) and for incident response when something goes wrong.

Best Practices

To get the most out of SkillReg's security features:

1. Always pin versions in production environments
2. Use organization scopes rather than personal scopes for team skills
3. Review security scan results before installing third-party skills
4. Rotate API tokens regularly and use CI-specific tokens with minimal permissions
5. Define guardrails in every skill to constrain agent behavior

Security is an ongoing process, not a feature you ship once. SkillReg gives you the tools to manage that process at scale. Get started today.