abusing-dpapi-for-credential-access

abusing-dpapi-for-credential-access is a skill for Claude Code from mukul975/Anthropic-Cybersecurity-Skills. It costs 97 tokens per session (2,594 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A procedure for recovering secrets protected by Windows DPAPI, the built-in system that encrypts saved passwords and other credentials. It covers authorized security testing of accounts, browsers, Wi-Fi, certificates, and related Windows data.

In plain words
What is it for?
Authorized red-team and penetration tests involving Windows Credential Manager, browser logins and cookies, Wi-Fi credentials, KeePass keys, and domain-wide DPAPI recovery.
Why use it?
It helps security testers assess whether stolen or already-accessible Windows data could expose additional credentials or account access.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the cybersecurity-skills plugin — 56 skills shipped together

Good fit Authorized red-team and penetration tests involving Windows Credential Manager, browser logins and cookies, Wi-Fi credentials, KeePass keys, and domain-wide DPAPI recovery.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/mukul975/anthropic-cybersecurity-skills/abusing-dpapi-for-credential-access
About the project

Anthropic Cybersecurity Skills is a library of structured cybersecurity procedures for AI agents, covering security domains and mappings to established security frameworks. It is for authorized security analysis, penetration testing, incident response, research, defense, and education across compatible AI platforms. The catalogue entries package parts of this library as agent skills, instructions, or a plugin.

mukul975/Anthropic-Cybersecurity-Skills · 32,457 stars · on GitHub · mahipal.engineer

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 mukul975/Anthropic-Cybersecurity-Skills --skill abusing-dpapi-for-credential-access
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mukul975/Anthropic-Cybersecurity-Skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install cybersecurity-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 56 skills.

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 abusing-dpapi-for-credential-access

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mukul975/anthropic-cybersecurity-skills/abusing-dpapi-for-credential-access/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/mukul975/anthropic-cybersecurity-skills/abusing-dpapi-for-credential-access)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mukul975/anthropic-cybersecurity-skills/abusing-dpapi-for-credential-access"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mukul975/anthropic-cybersecurity-skills/abusing-dpapi-for-credential-access/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for abusing-dpapi-for-credential-access

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mukul975/anthropic-cybersecurity-skills/abusing-dpapi-for-credential-access"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mukul975/anthropic-cybersecurity-skills/abusing-dpapi-for-credential-access.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 97 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,594 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
  • Socket fail 3 Aug 2026
  • Snyk fail 3 Aug 2026
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 3 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 YARA Match · line 3
    YARA rule matched a known malware signature (reverse shell, backdoor, ransomware, C2 framework, or info stealer).
    Fix: Remove the malware payload or compromised file entirely. Investigate how it entered the skill and audit all other artifacts for additional indicators of compromise.
  • high Privilege Escalation · line 80
    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 141
    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 $0.00097 $0.02594
Opus 5 $0.00048 $0.01297
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00519
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00259

Measured 10d ago against content hash e62c6659059f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

abusing-dpapi-for-credential-access 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 10d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/agent.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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

2 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

skills/abusing-dpapi-for-credential-access/SKILL.md · 210 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 210 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Abusing DPAPI for Credential Access

Legal Notice: This skill is for authorized penetration testing, red-team engagements, and educational purposes only. Extracting credentials from systems you do not own or lack explicit written authorization to test is illegal and may violate computer fraud and abuse laws. Always operate within a signed rules-of-engagement and document every action.

Overview

The Windows Data Protection API (DPAPI) is the operating system's built-in symmetric-encryption service that applications use to protect secrets at rest: saved RDP and Windows Credential Manager credentials, web and Wi-Fi credentials in the Credential Vault, browser saved logins and cookies (Chrome/Edge), KeePass keys, certificate private keys, and Scheduled Task passwords. DPAPI derives a per-user (or per-machine) master key from the user's password (or the machine account secret), and that master key encrypts individual "DPAPI blobs." The encrypted master keys live under %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Protect\<SID>\ (user) and %WINDIR%\System32\Microsoft\Protect\ (machine).

Red teamers abuse DPAPI to recover plaintext secrets after gaining a foothold, mapping to MITRE ATT&CK T1555.004 (Credentials from Password Stores: Windows Credential Manager). There are three primary decryption paths:

  1. Online / context-based — running as the target user, DPAPI APIs (CryptUnprotectData) transparently decrypt the user's blobs. SharpDPAPI's /unprotect flag uses this.
  2. Offline with the user password or NTLM hash — decrypt the user's master keys with /password: or /ntlm:, then decrypt the blobs offline (great for triaged files pulled from a host).
  3. Domain-wide with the DPAPI backup key — Domain Admins can extract the domain's RSA DPAPI backup key (.pvk) once, then decrypt any domain user's master keys forever, online or offline, with /pvk:.

The canonical tooling is SharpDPAPI (GhostPack, a C# port of Mimikatz DPAPI functionality) for Windows, SharpChrome for browser secrets, and Mimikatz (dpapi::*) as the original implementation. On Linux, Impacket's dpapi.py and donpapi perform remote/offline triage.

Read the full file on GitHub · 210 lines

Files

What ships with it

4 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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. 10d ago First seen · 210 lines · 97 tokens per session scan A e62c6659059f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

abusing-dpapi-for-credential-access is a skill published in the GitHub repository mukul975/Anthropic-Cybersecurity-Skills (32,457 stars, last pushed 10d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 97 tokens to every session and 2,594 once invoked, about $0.0005 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.

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