cursorrules

Rules for protecting secrets in Cursor, an AI code editor, using Phantom Secrets, a tool that stores credentials in an encrypted vault.

In plain words
What is it for?
Listing secret names safely, adding or removing credentials, running commands with injected secrets, protecting environment files, rotating tokens, and checking vault health.
Why use it?
They prevent real API keys from being exposed, hardcoded, logged, or requested in source files.

Cursor rule for Cursor

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 rules/ashlrai/phantom-secrets/cursorrules
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ashlrai/phantom-secrets

Made for: Cursor.

Per session 479 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 479 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 $0.00479 $0.00479
Opus 5 $0.00239 $0.00239
Sonnet 5 $0.00096 $0.00096
Haiku 4.5 $0.00048 $0.00048

Measured yesterday against content hash 5ca84070cded, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

cursorrules 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 yesterday.

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.

.cursorrules · 48 lines

What it actually says

Phantom Secrets — Cursor Rules

This project uses Phantom Secrets to protect API keys from AI leaks.

Rules

  • .env contains phantom tokens (phm_...), NOT real secrets. This is intentional.
  • Real secrets are in an encrypted vault. Never attempt to read them directly.
  • NEVER hardcode API keys in source code.
  • NEVER ask the user to paste real API key values into code files.
  • NEVER log, display, or write real secret values to any file.

Available Commands

  • phantom list — See available secrets (never shows values)
  • phantom add <name> <value> — Add a new secret
  • phantom remove <name> — Remove a secret
  • phantom exec -- <command> — Run code with real credentials injected via proxy
  • phantom init — Protect .env secrets
  • phantom rotate — Regenerate all phantom tokens
  • phantom status — Show vault status and secret count
  • phantom doctor — Health check

MCP Server

Phantom has an MCP server with 9 tools. Add it in Cursor Settings > Features > MCP Servers:

  • Name: phantom
  • Command: npx phantom-secrets-mcp

MCP Tools

  • phantom_init — Protect .env secrets
  • phantom_list_secrets — List secret names (never values)
  • phantom_status — Show vault and config status
  • phantom_add_secret — Add a secret (params: name, value)
  • phantom_remove_secret — Remove a secret (params: name)
  • phantom_rotate — Regenerate phantom tokens
  • phantom_cloud_push — Push encrypted vault to cloud
  • phantom_cloud_pull — Pull vault from cloud
  • phantom_cloud_status — Check cloud sync status

When You See API Keys

If a user shares a real API key (sk-*, ghp_*, xoxb-*, etc.):

  1. Store it with phantom add <KEY_NAME> <value> (or phantom_add_secret via MCP)
  2. Reference the phantom token in code, never the real value
  3. Never write the real key into any file
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. yesterday First seen · 48 lines · 479 tokens per session scan A 5ca84070cded

Subscribe to this mod's changes

cursorrules is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository ashlrai/phantom-secrets (16 stars, last pushed 13d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 479 tokens to every session, about $0.0024 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 2026-08-30.