reviewing-cryptography

reviewing-cryptography is a skill for Claude Code from trilwu/secskills. It costs 70 tokens per session (2,704 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A security review guide for code that uses cryptography, such as encryption, digital signatures, hashes, passwords, tokens, or TLS. It focuses on incorrect use of established cryptographic tools and protocols.

In plain words
What is it for?
Auditing encryption and signing code, key storage and rotation, TLS and JWT settings, password storage, randomness, and timing-related leaks.
Why use it?
Many cryptographic failures come from configuration and handling mistakes, such as reused nonces, exposed keys, unauthenticated ciphertext, or weak comparisons.

Skill for Claude Code

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

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

Good fit Auditing encryption and signing code, key storage and rotation, TLS and JWT settings, password storage, randomness, and timing-related leaks.

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

Made for: Claude Code.

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 reviewing-cryptography

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/trilwu/secskills/reviewing-cryptography"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/trilwu/secskills/reviewing-cryptography.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 70 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,704 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 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: 1 finding, up to medium

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 →

  • medium Excessive Agency · line 204
    Skill enables autonomous high-impact decisions without human-in-the-loop verification. Critical operations (destructive commands, financial transactions, data deletion) should require explicit user confirmation.
    Fix: Add human-in-the-loop confirmation for destructive, irreversible, or high-impact operations. Never auto-execute commands that modify files, send data, or alter system state.
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 $0.00070 $0.02704
Opus 5 $0.00035 $0.01352
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00541
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00270

Measured 10d ago against content hash 223587ea2425, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

reviewing-cryptography 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 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.

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
Origin

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

secskills-core/skills/reviewing-cryptography/SKILL.md · 249 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 249 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Reviewing Cryptography

Almost no real system is broken by cryptanalysis. They are broken by misuse: a reused nonce, unauthenticated ciphertext, a comparison that returns early, a key checked into git. Review for misuse, and leave primitive design to cryptographers.

When to Use

  • Auditing code that encrypts, decrypts, signs, verifies, or hashes
  • Reviewing key management, rotation, and storage
  • Assessing TLS/mTLS configuration and certificate validation
  • Reviewing JWT, session token, and API signature schemes
  • Checking password and secret storage
  • Evaluating randomness quality for security-relevant values

When NOT to Use

  • Designing a new primitive or protocol — that needs a cryptographer and formal review, not a code audit
  • Breaking cryptography in a CTF — different discipline; use solving-oriented offensive skills and known-attack tooling
  • General code review — use auditing-code-for-vulnerabilities
  • Password cracking — use cracking-passwords

The Misuse Checklist

Work through these in order. Each has caught real production breaks.

1. Is the ciphertext authenticated?

Encryption without authentication is the single most common serious finding. CBC or CTR without a MAC means an attacker can modify plaintext — and with a decryption oracle, recover it (padding oracle).

Good:  AES-GCM, ChaCha20-Poly1305, AES-CBC + HMAC (encrypt-then-MAC)
Bad:   AES-CBC alone, AES-ECB (ever), CTR without a MAC, MAC-then-encrypt
rg -n 'AES/ECB|AES\.MODE_ECB|CipherMode\.ECB|"AES"\)' -i
rg -n 'AES/CBC/PKCS5Padding|MODE_CBC|createCipheriv\(.*cbc' -i

If you see CBC, find the MAC. If there is no MAC, that is a finding regardless of how the ciphertext is transported.

2. Nonce and IV handling

Mode Rule Failure
GCM / ChaCha20-Poly1305 Never reuse a (key, nonce) pair Catastrophic: reveals the auth key, forgery becomes trivial
CBC IV must be unpredictable and random per message Chosen-plaintext attacks (BEAST-class)
CTR Never reuse a counter with the same key Keystream reuse; XOR of plaintexts

Read the full file on GitHub · 249 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 · 249 lines · 70 tokens per session scan A 223587ea2425

Subscribe to this mod's changes

reviewing-cryptography is a skill published in the GitHub repository trilwu/secskills (138 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 70 tokens to every session and 2,704 once invoked, about $0.0003 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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