diffing-binary-patches

diffing-binary-patches is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from trilwu/secskills. It costs 108 tokens per session (1,751 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A method for comparing a vulnerable binary with its patched version to discover what security fix changed. The changed functions and added checks can reveal the bug type and the input that reached it before the fix.

In plain words
What is it for?
Comparing DLL, ELF, or driver versions, analyzing CVE fixes and Microsoft patches, locating silent security changes, and assessing whether the old code was reachable before building an exploit.
Why use it?
Security advisories often describe a problem broadly, while the binary difference shows the exact code change. This supports one-day analysis, meaning investigation of a recently disclosed vulnerability before every system is updated.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the secskills-core plugin — 30 skills shipped together

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/trilwu/secskills/diffing-binary-patches
Any agent
npx skills add trilwu/secskills --skill diffing-binary-patches
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/trilwu/secskills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install secskills-core, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 30 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 diffing-binary-patches

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/trilwu/secskills/diffing-binary-patches.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/trilwu/secskills/diffing-binary-patches)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/trilwu/secskills/diffing-binary-patches"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/trilwu/secskills/diffing-binary-patches.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 108 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,751 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 1 finding. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00108 $0.01751
Opus 5 $0.00054 $0.00875
Sonnet 5 $0.00022 $0.00350
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00175

Measured 4d ago against content hash da8bd8200924, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

diffing-binary-patches scanned grade A 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 4d 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.

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

curl -sL "https://defuddle.md/<url>" # scheme in the path is optional
secskills-core/skills/diffing-binary-patches/SKILL.md · 148 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 148 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Diffing Binary Patches

A security patch is a description of a vulnerability written in the vendor's own code. Diffing the binary before and after the fix turns a one-line advisory into the exact function, the exact check that was added, and — reasoning backward — the input that reached the bug before the patch. This is the core of 1-day analysis: the fix tells you where to look, the diff tells you what, and the pre-patch reachability tells you how.

When to Use

  • Comparing two versions of the same binary (DLL, ELF, driver) to find what a security update changed
  • Turning a CVE advisory or Patch-Tuesday bulletin into the specific vulnerable code
  • Extracting a Microsoft patch (MSU/MSP/cab, delta-compressed) into a full binary you can diff
  • Assessing whether a "silent" fix in a new release closed a security bug

When NOT to Use

  • Understanding a single binary with no patched counterpart — that is analyzing-binaries.
  • Building the working exploit once the bug and trigger are understood — that is exploiting-memory-corruption (native) or the relevant web skill.
  • Source-level diffs (a GitHub commit, a changelog) — read the source with reviewing-code-changes; binary diffing is for when you only have compiled artifacts.
  • Unpacking a protected binary before it can be diffed — use unpacking-protected-binaries first.

Get Two Comparable Binaries

The diff is only as clean as the inputs. You need the same binary at two versions, same architecture and ideally the same compiler, so the noise is small enough that the security change stands out.

For Microsoft patches this is a step in itself. Since Windows 10, updates ship as forward/reverse delta patches, not whole files — the MSU contains compressed deltas, not the finished DLL. Extract the update (expand the MSU/cab) and apply the delta to your baseline binary to reconstruct the full patched file (the PatchExtract / delta_patch.py approach, driving the msdelta API). Diffing the raw delta or a mismatched baseline produces garbage. For most other software, two release builds or two package versions are directly comparable.

Read the full file on GitHub · 148 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. 4d ago First seen · 148 lines · 108 tokens per session scan A da8bd8200924

Subscribe to this mod's changes

diffing-binary-patches is a skill published in the GitHub repository trilwu/secskills (134 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 108 tokens to every session and 1,751 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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