attacking-grpc-protobuf

attacking-grpc-protobuf is a skill for Claude Code from trilwu/secskills. It costs 87 tokens per session (2,159 once invoked), scanned B, original, MIT.

A security-testing guide for gRPC services and Protocol Buffers, a system that sends structured data in a compact binary format. It helps recover the service description needed to understand and call methods that are not readable like normal JSON APIs.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to recover .proto definitions, call methods with gRPC tools, inspect gRPC-Web traffic, and test unknown message fields and service behavior.
Why use it?
It removes the uncertainty caused by opaque HTTP/2 traffic and missing interface definitions. It also helps expose authorization weaknesses in internal services or browser and mobile backends.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the secskills-offense plugin — 40 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to recover .proto definitions, call methods with gRPC tools, inspect gRPC-Web traffic, and test unknown message fields and service behavior.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/trilwu/secskills/attacking-grpc-protobuf
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 trilwu/secskills --skill attacking-grpc-protobuf
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/trilwu/secskills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install secskills-offense, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 40 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 attacking-grpc-protobuf

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/trilwu/secskills/attacking-grpc-protobuf/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/trilwu/secskills/attacking-grpc-protobuf)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/trilwu/secskills/attacking-grpc-protobuf"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/trilwu/secskills/attacking-grpc-protobuf/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 attacking-grpc-protobuf

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/trilwu/secskills/attacking-grpc-protobuf"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/trilwu/secskills/attacking-grpc-protobuf.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 87 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,159 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan B 1 finding. 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: 4 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 Prompt Injection · line 191
    Hidden instructions were detected in comments or invisible text. These could contain malicious directives. Manual review is recommended.
    Fix: Audit all comments and invisible characters. Remove any instructions that direct the agent to perform unauthorized actions. Use plain, reviewable content.
  • medium Data Exfiltration · line 89
    Data is being sent to an external URL. This could be legitimate telemetry or data exfiltration. Manual review is recommended.
    Fix: Verify the destination URL is trusted and necessary. Remove or replace with documented APIs. Ensure no secrets, tokens, or PII are transmitted.
  • medium Data Exfiltration · line 146
    Data is being sent to an external URL. This could be legitimate telemetry or data exfiltration. Manual review is recommended.
    Fix: Verify the destination URL is trusted and necessary. Remove or replace with documented APIs. Ensure no secrets, tokens, or PII are transmitted.
  • medium Data Exfiltration · line 160
    Data is being sent to an external URL. This could be legitimate telemetry or data exfiltration. Manual review is recommended.
    Fix: Verify the destination URL is trusted and necessary. Remove or replace with documented APIs. Ensure no secrets, tokens, or PII are transmitted.
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 $0.00087 $0.02159
Opus 5 $0.00044 $0.01079
Sonnet 5 $0.00017 $0.00432
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00216

Measured 7d ago against content hash 0be73e0af435, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade B, and why

attacking-grpc-protobuf scanned grade B 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 7d 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.

Sends data to an external URLmediumData exfiltration

A POST to an outside endpoint may be telemetry or may be exfiltration; either way the mod talks to somewhere, and you should know where.

grpcurl -plaintext -d '{"user_id": 1}' target:50051 package.Service/GetUser
secskills-offense/skills/attacking-grpc-protobuf/SKILL.md · 214 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 214 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Attacking gRPC and Protobuf Services

gRPC breaks the tooling assumption that a request is readable text over HTTP/1.1. Burp shows a binary blob or nothing at all, and without the schema you cannot even name the methods. Recover the schema and it becomes an ordinary API test — with the twist that gRPC services are frequently internal services newly exposed, which means their authorization is often weaker than the REST API in front of them.

When to Use

  • Traffic uses HTTP/2 with content-type: application/grpc
  • A request or response body is opaque binary with no JSON structure
  • The app is a mobile or desktop client talking to a backend over protobuf
  • You find .proto files, *_pb2.py, *.pb.go, or grpc in a codebase
  • application/grpc-web or application/grpc-web+proto appears in a browser app

When NOT to Use

  • REST or GraphQL — use testing-apis
  • The proxy cannot see the traffic at all on mobile — use bypassing-mobile-pinning; gRPC clients often ignore system proxy settings
  • Source code is available — use auditing-code-for-vulnerabilities, and read the .proto files directly
  • Binary protocol that is not protobuf — use analyzing-binaries

Recover the Schema

Everything depends on this. Four routes, in order of cost.

1. Server reflection. Many services ship it enabled, often unintentionally.

grpcurl -plaintext target:50051 list
grpcurl -plaintext target:50051 list package.ServiceName
grpcurl -plaintext target:50051 describe package.ServiceName.MethodName
grpcurl -plaintext target:50051 describe package.RequestMessage

# TLS
grpcurl target:443 list
grpcurl -insecure target:443 list          # self-signed / proxy in path

Reflection enabled on an internet-facing service is itself worth reporting — it is the gRPC equivalent of GraphQL introspection in production.

2. Descriptors compiled into a client. Protobuf embeds a serialized FileDescriptorProto in generated code, so the schema is recoverable from any client binary.

Read the full file on GitHub · 214 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. 7d ago First seen · 214 lines · 87 tokens per session scan B 0be73e0af435

Subscribe to this mod's changes

attacking-grpc-protobuf is a skill published in the GitHub repository trilwu/secskills (138 stars, last pushed 6d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 87 tokens to every session and 2,159 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it B with 1 finding (sends data to an external url). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

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