zero-static-credentials

zero-static-credentials is a skill for Claude Code from oborchers/fractional-cto. It costs 86 tokens per session (3,222 once invoked), scanned C, original, MIT.

A guide to using short-lived access tokens instead of permanent cloud passwords, SSH keys, VPN files, or provider key files. It covers access for people, automated pipelines, and operators.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps design SSO for people, OIDC-based authentication for CI/CD pipelines, session-based operator access, and safer handling of third-party service keys.
Why use it?
It helps reduce the risk of credentials being copied, forgotten, over-permissioned, or leaked without quick central revocation.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the cloud-foundation-principles plugin — 16 skills, 1 command, 1 agent shipped together

Good fit It helps design SSO for people, OIDC-based authentication for CI/CD pipelines, session-based operator access, and safer handling of third-party service keys.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/oborchers/fractional-cto/zero-static-credentials
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 zero-static-credentials
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/oborchers/fractional-cto

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install cloud-foundation-principles, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 16 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 zero-static-credentials

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/oborchers/fractional-cto/zero-static-credentials.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/oborchers/fractional-cto/zero-static-credentials)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/oborchers/fractional-cto/zero-static-credentials"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/oborchers/fractional-cto/zero-static-credentials.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 86 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,222 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan C 1 finding. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
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 $0.00086 $0.03222
Opus 5 $0.00043 $0.01611
Sonnet 5 $0.00017 $0.00644
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00322

Measured 8d ago against content hash 3241745ff084, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade C, and why

zero-static-credentials scanned grade C with 1 finding 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 8d 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.

Reaches for credential fileshighPrivilege escalation

SSH keys, cloud credentials, git-credentials, .npmrc, /etc/shadow: reading these is how a config file becomes a credential leak.

- Developer has AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID in ~/.aws/credentials
cloud-foundation-principles/skills/zero-static-credentials/SKILL.md · 308 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 308 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

No .pem Files, No .ovpn Files, No Long-Lived API Keys

Static credentials are the number one cause of cloud security breaches. An SSH key on a developer's laptop, a VPN configuration file shared via Slack, cloud provider access keys stored in a CI/CD secret -- each one is a ticking time bomb. Static credentials cannot be revoked instantly across all consumers. They accumulate silently over time. They are almost always over-permissioned. And when they leak (not if), the blast radius is unknowable because nobody tracks where they were copied.

Zero static credentials applies fully to cloud provider credentials -- no long-lived AWS access keys, no GCP service account key files, no SSH key pairs, no VPN configuration files. Every cloud access path uses short-lived, automatically rotated, centrally revocable tokens. Three core access patterns cover the vast majority of cloud interactions.

Third-party service credentials (Supabase keys, Stripe API keys, NPM tokens, SendGrid keys) are a different category. Most third-party services do not support OIDC or workload identity federation, so these credentials must be stored somewhere. CI/CD secret stores and cloud secrets managers are the correct places -- they are encrypted, access-controlled, and auditable. For these credentials, the goal is not elimination but proper management: store in an encrypted secret store, scope to minimum permissions, and rotate on a schedule where the service supports it.

The Core Access Patterns

These three patterns cover human access, automated pipelines, and operational debugging. If a proposed access method does not use short-lived, centrally revocable tokens, it is a security liability.

Pattern Who How Token Lifetime
Human -> SSO -> Cloud Developers, operators, admins Federated identity (SSO) to cloud console and CLI 1-12 hours (session)
Pipeline -> OIDC -> Cloud CI/CD workflows, automated deploys Workload identity federation (OIDC) Minutes (per-job)
Operator -> Session Manager -> Instance On-call engineers, debuggers Session-based instance access (no SSH) Duration of session

Read the full file on GitHub · 308 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. 8d ago First seen · 308 lines · 86 tokens per session scan C 3241745ff084

Subscribe to this mod's changes

zero-static-credentials is a skill published in the GitHub repository oborchers/fractional-cto (29 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 86 tokens to every session and 3,222 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it C with 1 finding (reaches for credential files). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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