secure-development-principles

General rules for writing and generating secure code, covering untrusted input, secrets, communications, dynamic code, validation, and logging.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use them when developing or reviewing applications, automation, and AI-generated code that handles external input or sensitive data.
Why use it?
They provide baseline checks for common security mistakes across languages and development tools.

Cursor rule

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/matank001/cursor-security-rules/secure-development-principles
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/matank001/cursor-security-rules
Per session 380 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 380 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 $0.00380 $0.00380
Opus 5 $0.00190 $0.00190
Sonnet 5 $0.00076 $0.00076
Haiku 4.5 $0.00038 $0.00038

Measured yesterday against content hash 8188b1892682, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

secure-development-principles 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.

secure-development-principles.mdc · 38 lines

What it actually says

Secure Development Principles

These rules define essential practices for writing and generating secure code.
They apply universally — to manual development, automated tooling, and AI-generated code.

All violations must include a clear explanation of which rule was triggered and why, to help developers understand and fix the issue effectively.

1. Do Not Use Raw User Input in Sensitive Operations

  • Rule: Untrusted input must never be used directly in file access, command execution, database queries, or similar sensitive operations.

2. Do Not Expose Secrets in Public Code

  • Rule: Secrets such as API keys, credentials, private keys, or tokens must not appear in frontend code, public repositories, or client-distributed files.

3. Enforce Secure Communication Protocols

  • Rule: Only secure protocols (e.g., HTTPS, TLS) must be used for all external communications.

4. Avoid Executing Dynamic Code

  • Rule: Dynamically constructed code or expressions must not be executed at runtime.

5. Validate All External Input

  • Rule: Inputs from users, external APIs, or third-party systems must be validated before use.

6. Do Not Log Sensitive Information

  • Rule: Logs must not contain credentials, tokens, personal identifiers, or other sensitive data.

7. Prevent Disabling of Security Controls

  • Rule: Security checks must not be disabled, bypassed, or suppressed without documented and reviewed justification.

8. Limit Trust in Client-Side Logic

  • Rule: Critical logic related to permissions, authentication, or validation must not rely solely on client-side code.

9. Detect and Eliminate Hardcoded Credentials

  • Rule: Credentials must not be hardcoded in source files, configuration, or scripts.
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 · 38 lines · 380 tokens per session scan A 8188b1892682

Subscribe to this mod's changes

secure-development-principles is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository matank001/cursor-security-rules (379 stars, last pushed 1y ago), licensed MIT. It adds 380 tokens to every session, about $0.0019 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.