hunting-formula-injection-in-exports

hunting-formula-injection-in-exports is a skill for Claude Code from UnboundCompute/security-agent-skills. It costs 192 tokens per session (2,128 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A security review guide for finding formula injection in CSV, TSV, or spreadsheet exports. Spreadsheet programs may treat a cell beginning with characters such as equals or plus as a formula rather than plain text.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to trace user-controlled fields into reports and other spreadsheet exports, and check whether formula-like leading characters are made harmless.
Why use it?
It prevents stored user input from becoming active spreadsheet content when a person opens an exported file, potentially sending data or launching an action.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the security-agent-skills plugin — 194 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to trace user-controlled fields into reports and other spreadsheet exports, and check whether formula-like leading characters are made harmless.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/unboundcompute/security-agent-skills/hunting-formula-injection-in-exports
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 UnboundCompute/security-agent-skills --skill hunting-formula-injection-in-exports
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/UnboundCompute/security-agent-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install security-agent-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 194 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 hunting-formula-injection-in-exports

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/unboundcompute/security-agent-skills/hunting-formula-injection-in-exports/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/unboundcompute/security-agent-skills/hunting-formula-injection-in-exports)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/unboundcompute/security-agent-skills/hunting-formula-injection-in-exports"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/unboundcompute/security-agent-skills/hunting-formula-injection-in-exports/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 hunting-formula-injection-in-exports

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/unboundcompute/security-agent-skills/hunting-formula-injection-in-exports"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/unboundcompute/security-agent-skills/hunting-formula-injection-in-exports.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 192 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,128 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.
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 $0.00192 $0.02128
Opus 5 $0.00096 $0.01064
Sonnet 5 $0.00038 $0.00426
Haiku 4.5 $0.00019 $0.00213

Measured 7d ago against content hash fe1ac0bdcacf, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

hunting-formula-injection-in-exports 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 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.

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.

skills/hunting-formula-injection-in-exports/SKILL.md · 140 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 140 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Hunting formula injection in exports: when a cell runs code on open

An application that lets users store text and later offers an export to a spreadsheet format has quietly built a delivery channel. Spreadsheet programs decide whether a cell is data or a formula by its first character: a leading equals, plus, minus, or at sign marks a formula, and so does a leading tab or carriage return that the program strips before parsing. So a value a user typed into a profile field, a comment, or a device name, stored verbatim and written into a downloaded report, becomes live code when an administrator opens that report. The formula can pull other cells out to an attacker URL through a web or hyperlink function, invoke a legacy dynamic-data exchange command that launches a program, or display misleading content the recipient trusts. The bug lives in the export writer, not the input page, and the victim is the person who opens the file. You find it by tracing stored untrusted fields into every export and checking whether dangerous leading characters are neutralized.

When to use

  • The application exports user-controlled data to CSV, TSV, or a spreadsheet workbook format.
  • A stored field (name, comment, description, tag) is written into a downloaded report opened by staff.
  • An admin, finance, or analytics workflow opens exports of user-submitted content in a spreadsheet.

Scope check

Test formula injection only against applications you own or are authorized to assess, and open confirming exports only in an isolated spreadsheet environment with no network egress and no sensitive cells, because a live formula can call out or launch a program on the machine that opens it. Never plant a payload where a real recipient would open it. If you can't name the authorization, stop.

The loop

  1. Establish that the export writes cells without neutralization first. Locate every code path that produces a CSV, TSV, or workbook export and read how it writes each cell. This is the false-positive killer: if the writer prefixes at-risk cells with a safe character, wraps values so the leading token is inert, forces the cell type to text, or strips leading formula characters, a stored value cannot become a formula and there is no bug. Name the exports that write stored values verbatim.

Read the full file on GitHub · 140 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 · 140 lines · 192 tokens per session scan A fe1ac0bdcacf

Subscribe to this mod's changes

hunting-formula-injection-in-exports is a skill published in the GitHub repository UnboundCompute/security-agent-skills (5 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 192 tokens to every session and 2,128 once invoked, about $0.0010 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 2026-09-05.

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