Preface¶
When conducting security self-checks before going live, many teams still rely on “a quick glance based on experience”: checking if there are hardcoded secrets, whether SQL is concatenated, or if dependencies have known CVEs. The checklist lives in their heads, but execution is often incomplete. Manual Code Review can cover part of this, but the OWASP Top 10 has a wide range of coverage, and it’s easy to miss items relying solely on memory.
Meanwhile, the Agent Skill ecosystem is also expanding rapidly. Community research that conducted large-scale scans of tens of thousands of public Skills found that a considerable proportion carry risks such as prompt injection and data exfiltration. Tools like SkillScan were therefore developed specifically for static analysis of “whether the Skill itself is secure”. In turn, our own business code also needs a reusable audit workflow — this is exactly the problem auditing-security aims to solve: codify common web security review steps into SKILL.md, allowing AI programming Agents like Cursor to systematically scan the code against the checklist, instead of starting from scratch ad-hoc every time.
What is this¶
auditing-security is a Skill under the “Code Quality & Security” category in the awesome-cursor-skills curated list, maintained by the Spencer Pauly community repository. It follows the universal SKILL.md format: a YAML frontmatter plus structured instruction body, which can be automatically discovered and invoked by tools that support Agent Skills such as Cursor, Claude Code, and Codex CLI.
The official description is straightforward: perform a systematic security audit on the codebase, checking for vulnerabilities related to OWASP Top 10, secret leaks, and insecure coding patterns. The Skill itself does not run penetration tests, but guides the Agent to conduct static code reviews, and finally outputs a findings report with severity levels (Critical / High / Medium / Low).
It is important to distinguish: auditing-security audits your project code; tools like SkillScan audit third-party Skill packages — they focus on different areas, but can be used together in the “security closed loop of AI-assisted development”: first audit the Skills you intend to install, then regularly run the audit workflow defined by this Skill on your business repository.
Core Features and Highlights¶
The Skill body splits the audit into 7 fixed steps, which the Agent executes in order to avoid one-sided reviews like “only checking for secrets but not authentication”.
1. Scan for Hardcoded Secrets
Search the source code for patterns of API Keys, Tokens, passwords, connection strings, etc., such as password=, secret=, token=, api_key=, as well as Base64-encoded credentials, AWS Keys (AKIA...), Stripe Keys (sk_live_...), and GitHub Tokens (ghp_...). Also check if .env files were accidentally committed to Git, and if config.json contains plaintext credentials.
2. Authentication and Authorization
Confirm that API routes complete authentication before processing requests; RBAC must be enforced on the server side, not only restricted at the UI layer; password hashing should use bcrypt/argon2 instead of MD5/SHA1; Session Tokens need to be set with HttpOnly, Secure flags, and have a reasonable expiration time.
3. Injection Vulnerabilities
- SQL Injection: String-concatenated SQL instead of parameterized queries
- XSS: dangerouslySetInnerHTML, innerHTML, or rendering of unescaped user input
- Command Injection: exec(), eval(), child_process.exec(), etc., receiving user input
- Path Traversal: File operation paths that do not sanitize user input
4. Dependency Security
Recommend running npm audit or pip audit, mark outdated dependencies with known CVEs, and pay attention to whether version ranges are overly permissive.
5. CORS and CSP
Production environments should not use Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *; check if Content-Security-Policy is configured, as well as security response headers such as X-Frame-Options, X-Content-Type-Options, and Strict-Transport-Security.
6. Data Exposure
Whether API responses leak password hashes, internal IDs, or PII; whether production environment error messages expose stack traces; whether sensitive data is written to logs.
7. Generate Report
Summarize all findings, mark the severity level, and provide file paths, line numbers, and repair suggestions.
The Skill also clarifies boundaries in its Notes: this is code review, not penetration testing; it can be used in conjunction with automated scanning tools like npm audit, Trivy, and Snyk; you should check if .gitignore excludes .env and secret files; for in-depth audits, refer to the OWASP Testing Guide.
Installation and Activation¶
The instructions for awesome-cursor-skills state: Copy the SKILL.md to Cursor’s skills directory, and the Agent will automatically discover it. In Cursor, skills are usually placed in the user-level .cursor/skills/ or project-level .cursor/skills/ directory.
Method 1: Manual Copy (Official Recommendation)¶
Run the following command at the project root:
mkdir -p .cursor/skills/auditing-security
curl -o .cursor/skills/auditing-security/SKILL.md \
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/spencerpauly/awesome-cursor-skills/main/resources/auditing-security/SKILL.md
If you want to share the Skill across all projects, replace .cursor/skills/ in the path with ~/.cursor/skills/ under your user home directory.
Method 2: Use the skills CLI¶
The awesome-cursor-skills README also lists npx skills as a Skill management tool. This CLI supports over 70 Agents including Cursor, Claude Code, and Codex, and can install individual Skills via repository path:
npx skills add https://github.com/spencerpauly/awesome-cursor-skills/tree/main/resources/auditing-security -a cursor -y
If you need to install it for Claude Code or Codex at the same time, append the corresponding agent name after -a. For the full list, refer to the skills CLI documentation.
No additional configuration is required after installation: When conversations contain intentions like “audit security”, “check vulnerabilities”, or “review security”, the Agent will automatically match and load the auditing-security workflow based on the Skill description.
Typical Usage Examples¶
The triggering scenarios for the Skill are clearly stated in the frontmatter and body — it is activated when the user requests security audits, vulnerability checks, or security hardening tasks. Here are several reproducible prompt examples:
Full Repository Audit (Most Common)
Please conduct a comprehensive security audit on the current codebase, check for secret leaks, injections, authentication, and dependency vulnerabilities per the OWASP Top 10, and output a report with severity levels.
Pre-launch Specialized Check
We are preparing to release a new version, please focus on checking: 1) Are there any hardcoded secrets or accidentally committed .env files; 2) Have all APIs been authenticated; 3) SQL and XSS risk points. Provide file paths and repair suggestions.
Dependency and Configuration Review
Run npm audit (or pip audit), and check if the CORS, CSP, and security response header configurations are reasonable, then summarize Critical/High level issues.
After the Agent loads the Skill, it will search and review the code item by item according to the 7-step checklist, and finally output structured findings. You can also limit the scope, for example, “only audit route authentication under the app/api/ directory”.
Applicable Scenarios and Notes¶
Who and What Scenarios It Fits
- Individuals or small teams conducting lightweight security self-checks before merging PRs or releasing versions
- Initial security assessment when taking over an unfamiliar codebase
- Development teams that do not have dedicated security specialists but want reviews that have a checklist and are repeatable
- Cooperate with reviewing-code and parallel-code-review (parallel Code Review Skills in the same awesome-cursor-skills repository): separate functional reviews and security reviews
Limitations and Notes
1. Cannot replace professional penetration testing and compliance audits. The Skill clearly states that it is code review; production-level protection still requires DAST/SAST tools, WAF, penetration testing, and process specifications.
2. Agent output requires manual review. AI may generate false positives or miss items, so Critical/High level issues must be confirmed by developers before being fixed.
3. Skill supply chain security is a separate line of work. Before installing community Skills, it is recommended to read the full SKILL.md and bundled scripts; you can use tools like SkillScan to scan the Skill package itself. The source of auditing-security is a public GitHub repository, and it is also recommended to check the original text before installation before copying it locally.
4. Dependency scanning requires a local environment. Whether npm audit / pip audit can run depends on whether the project has the corresponding package manager and lockfile installed.
5. Paths vary slightly across tools. The installation method in this article is based on the awesome-cursor-skills and skills CLI documentation; project-level skills directories for Claude Code and other tools may be .claude/skills/, just copy the same SKILL.md — refer to the official documentation of each tool for specifics.
Summary¶
auditing-security codifies the OWASP-oriented security review checklist into a 7-step workflow executable by Agents: from secrets, authentication, and injections, to dependencies, CORS/CSP, data exposure, and finally graded reports — making “doing a full security sweep” no longer dependent on the reviewer’s memory on the day. It audits your business code; in an era where risks in the Skill ecosystem are frequently discussed, it complements tools like SkillScan that “audit Skills”, forming a more complete security chain for AI-assisted development.
Official Skill and repository addresses:
- Skill directory: https://github.com/spencerpauly/awesome-cursor-skills/tree/main/resources/auditing-security
- Curated list: https://github.com/spencerpauly/awesome-cursor-skills
- Original SKILL.md: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/spencerpauly/awesome-cursor-skills/main/resources/auditing-security/SKILL.md