rate-limiting-and-security

rate-limiting-and-security is a skill for Claude Code from oborchers/fractional-cto. It costs 79 tokens per session (3,466 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to protecting API endpoints from excessive traffic, invalid requests, and common security attacks. It covers rate limiting, which controls how many requests a client can make, along with related API protections.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when adding rate-limit algorithms and headers, securing endpoints, validating input, configuring CORS, or implementing request signing.
Why use it?
It helps prevent overload, abuse, unauthorized access, and vulnerabilities caused by unvalidated input or unsafe cross-origin settings.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the api-design-principles plugin — 13 skills, 1 command, 1 agent shipped together

Good fit Use it when adding rate-limit algorithms and headers, securing endpoints, validating input, configuring CORS, or implementing request signing.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/oborchers/fractional-cto/rate-limiting-and-security
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 oborchers/fractional-cto --skill rate-limiting-and-security
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/oborchers/fractional-cto

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install api-design-principles, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 13 skills, 1 command, 1 agent.

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 rate-limiting-and-security

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/oborchers/fractional-cto/rate-limiting-and-security/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/oborchers/fractional-cto/rate-limiting-and-security)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/oborchers/fractional-cto/rate-limiting-and-security"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/oborchers/fractional-cto/rate-limiting-and-security/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 rate-limiting-and-security

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/oborchers/fractional-cto/rate-limiting-and-security"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/oborchers/fractional-cto/rate-limiting-and-security.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 79 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,466 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 pass 7 Sept 2026
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 $0.00079 $0.03466
Opus 5 $0.00039 $0.01733
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.00693
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00347

Measured 12d ago against content hash c2f929e2a933, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

rate-limiting-and-security 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 12d 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.

api-design-principles/skills/rate-limiting-and-security/SKILL.md · 238 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 238 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Guard Every Gate, Log Every Attempt

Rate limiting and security are not features you bolt on before launch. They are load-bearing walls. Stripe rate-limits at 100 requests per second per key. GitHub returns X-RateLimit-Remaining on every single response. Cloudflare rejects millions of malicious requests before they reach origin servers. These companies do not treat protection as optional — they treat it as infrastructure. An unprotected API is not "MVP-ready"; it is a liability waiting for its first spike of traffic or its first automated attacker.

The patterns below are drawn from Stripe, GitHub, Twilio, Cloudflare, the OWASP API Security Top 10 (2023 edition), and the IETF RateLimit header fields draft. Where these sources converge, treat the practice as non-negotiable.

Rate Limiting Algorithms

Choose the algorithm that matches your traffic shape. The sliding window counter is the right default for most APIs.

Algorithm Burst Handling Memory Accuracy Best For
Fixed Window Poor (2x burst at boundary) Very low Approximate Simple internal APIs
Sliding Window Log None (strict) High Exact Audit-sensitive endpoints
Sliding Window Counter Good Low Very good Most APIs (recommended)
Token Bucket Controlled burst up to capacity Low Good API gateways, cloud APIs
Leaky Bucket None (queued, adds latency) Moderate Exact Traffic smoothing

Fixed Window divides time into discrete intervals (e.g., one minute) and counts requests per interval. The problem: 100 requests at 0:59 and 100 at 1:01 produce 200 requests in two seconds — double the intended rate. Only use this for non-critical internal services.

Sliding Window Counter is a hybrid that weights the previous window's count against the current window's position. At 15 seconds into a new minute, 75% of the previous window's count plus 100% of the current window's count approximates the true trailing-window count. Two counters per key, no timestamp storage, no boundary burst. This is the algorithm most production APIs use.

Read the full file on GitHub · 238 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 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. 12d ago First seen · 238 lines · 79 tokens per session scan A c2f929e2a933

Subscribe to this mod's changes

rate-limiting-and-security is a skill published in the GitHub repository oborchers/fractional-cto (30 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 79 tokens to every session and 3,466 once invoked, about $0.0004 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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