secret-handling

secret-handling is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from github/gh-aw. It costs 19 tokens per session (1,998 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A security policy for handling environment files and credentials in agent work. Environment files often contain configuration values such as database passwords and API keys.

In plain words
What is it for?
Guiding agents away from sensitive files, identifying allowed placeholder files, and requesting configuration details safely.
Why use it?
It prevents live secrets from being read and accidentally copied into committed team files or Git history. It defines safer alternatives such as example configuration files and documentation.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex ✓ vendor

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Guiding agents away from sensitive files, identifying allowed placeholder files, and requesting configuration details safely.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/github/gh-aw/secret-handling
About the project

GitHub Agentic Workflows is a GitHub CLI extension that lets developers define AI-assisted repository automation in Markdown and run it through GitHub Actions. It is intended for tasks requiring interpretation or reasoning, such as issue triage, pull-request review, CI investigation, documentation maintenance, and dependency analysis. The catalogue entries provide skills and agents for working with these workflows.

github/gh-aw · 5,109 stars · on GitHub · gh.io

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.

Any agent
npx skills add github/gh-aw --skill secret-handling
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/github/gh-aw

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for secret-handling

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/github/gh-aw/secret-handling.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/github/gh-aw/secret-handling)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/github/gh-aw/secret-handling"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/github/gh-aw/secret-handling.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 19 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,998 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 2 findings, up to high

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • high Privilege Escalation · line 3
    Code accesses credential files (SSH keys, AWS credentials, etc.). This could indicate credential theft attempts.
    Fix: Remove references to credential paths. Use environment variables or secrets managers. For docs, use placeholder paths (e.g., /path/to/config). Never load .env or token files in production code paths.
  • high Privilege Escalation · line 36
    Code accesses credential files (SSH keys, AWS credentials, etc.). This could indicate credential theft attempts.
    Fix: Remove references to credential paths. Use environment variables or secrets managers. For docs, use placeholder paths (e.g., /path/to/config). Never load .env or token files in production code paths.
How audits are shown
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 5.1 $0.00019 $0.01998
Opus 5 $0.00010 $0.00999
Sonnet 5 $0.00004 $0.00400
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00200

Measured 4d ago against content hash b9222aa13274, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

secret-handling 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 4d 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.

Origin

Copies of this mod

8 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

.squad/templates/skills/secret-handling/SKILL.md · 201 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 201 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Context

Spawned agents have read access to the entire repository, including .env files containing live credentials. If an agent reads secrets and writes them to .squad/ files (decisions, logs, history), Scribe auto-commits them to git, exposing them in remote history. This skill codifies absolute prohibitions and safe alternatives.

Patterns

Prohibited File Reads

NEVER read these files:

  • .env (production secrets)
  • .env.local (local dev secrets)
  • .env.production (production environment)
  • .env.development (development environment)
  • .env.staging (staging environment)
  • .env.test (test environment with real credentials)
  • Any file matching .env.* UNLESS explicitly allowed (see below)

Allowed alternatives:

  • .env.example (safe — contains placeholder values, no real secrets)
  • .env.sample (safe — documentation template)
  • .env.template (safe — schema/structure reference)

If you need config info:

  1. Ask the user directly — "What's the database connection string?"
  2. Read .env.example — shows structure without exposing secrets
  3. Read documentation — check README.md, docs/, config guides

NEVER assume you can "just peek at .env to understand the schema." Use .env.example or ask.

Prohibited Output Patterns

NEVER write these to .squad/ files:

Pattern Type Examples Regex Pattern (for scanning)
API Keys OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-proj-..., GITHUB_TOKEN=ghp_... `[A-Z_]+(?:KEY
Passwords DB_PASSWORD=super_secret_123, password: "..." `(?:PASSWORD
Connection Strings postgres://user:pass@host:5432/db, Server=...;Password=... `(?:postgres
JWT Tokens eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9... eyJ[A-Za-z0-9_-]+\.eyJ[A-Za-z0-9_-]+\.[A-Za-z0-9_-]+
Private Keys -----BEGIN PRIVATE KEY-----, -----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY----- -----BEGIN [A-Z ]+PRIVATE KEY-----
AWS Credentials AKIA..., aws_secret_access_key=... `AKIA[0-9A-Z]{16}
Email Addresses [email protected] (PII violation per team decision) [a-zA-Z0-9._%+-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,}

Read the full file on GitHub · 201 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. 4d ago First seen · 201 lines · 19 tokens per session scan A b9222aa13274

Subscribe to this mod's changes

secret-handling is a skill published in the GitHub repository github/gh-aw (5,109 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 19 tokens to every session and 1,998 once invoked, about $0.0001 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 2026-09-03.

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