Security Standards

Security guidance for checking and strengthening authentication, permissions, user input, secrets, personal data, payments, files, databases, and AI features.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when changing login flows, access rules, APIs, webhooks, uploads, database policies, payments, personal data, or server-side actions.
Why use it?
It helps prevent common security mistakes, such as trusting the browser, skipping permissions on internal endpoints, exposing secrets, or allowing unsafe input into privileged code.

Instructions file for GitHub Copilot

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add instructions/yuri-semenenko/ai-engineering-workspace/security
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/yuri-semenenko/ai-engineering-workspace

Made for: GitHub Copilot.

Per session 751 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 751 The same file — it is already loaded in full.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00751 $0.00751
Opus 5 $0.00376 $0.00376
Sonnet 5 $0.00150 $0.00150
Haiku 4.5 $0.00075 $0.00075

Measured 2d ago against content hash cbc19dfb0296, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

Security Standards scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

copilot/workspace-template/.github/instructions/security.instructions.md · 50 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 50 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Security Standards

Apply when a change touches authentication, authorization, user input, external calls, secrets, payments, personal data, file uploads, database access policies, or server-side actions.

Rationalizations

Excuses that precede a skipped control, paired with the answer. If you think the left, the right applies.

  • "Internal endpoint, no auth needed." -> Internal is a network assumption, not a guarantee. Authn + authz still apply.
  • "Just an MVP, harden later." -> Auth, secrets, and injection are table stakes, not later-work.
  • "Input comes from our own frontend." -> The frontend is not a trust boundary. The API is. Validate at the boundary.
  • "It's behind a login, so it's safe." -> Authn is not authz. IDOR lives here: check owner/role on every resource.
  • "The framework auto-escapes output." -> Verify the sink. Raw HTML, raw SQL, and template bypasses exist.

Check

  • Trust boundaries: know the source of every input and whether it crosses from user, browser, webhook, third party, or internal service into privileged code.
  • Authorization on the server, not just gated UI. Verify actor, tenant, ownership, role, and object-level access before reading or mutating data.
  • Input validation at the boundary: shape, type, range, encoding, and allowed values before use in SQL, file paths, shell, redirects, templates, or API calls. Prefer allowlists.
  • Secrets stay out of code, logs, and responses. Never print tokens, connection strings, cookies, private keys, or signed URLs.
  • Output safety: do not leak internal errors, stack traces, access tokens, personal data, or other tenants' data in responses, logs, or analytics.
  • Postgres/Supabase: row-level security on every table, least-privileged client on the server (anon vs service-role), and ownership checks not left to RLS alone in trusted server paths.
  • Dependencies: prefer existing ones. For new packages check maintenance, transitive risk, and postinstall scripts, and watch for typosquatting.
  • LLM/AI calls: treat model output as untrusted (no direct eval, SQL, shell, innerHTML, or file paths), enforce permissions in code rather than the system prompt, and keep secrets and cross-user data out of the context window.

Read the full file on GitHub · 50 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 50 lines · 751 tokens per session scan A cbc19dfb0296

Subscribe to this mod's changes

Security Standards is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository yuri-semenenko/ai-engineering-workspace (1 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 751 tokens to every session, about $0.0038 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.