HackSkills is an organized knowledge base of installable skills that gives AI agents practical security knowledge across areas such as web security, privilege escalation, reverse engineering, and digital forensics. It is intended for bug bounty work, penetration testing, CTF competitions, and authorized security research. The catalogue entries are the project's own master, category, and topic skills.
Getting it into your agent
It runs from inside its repository, so the clone comes first — what it calls does not travel with the file alone.
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/yaklang/hack-skillsnpx agentmods add skills/yaklang/hack-skills/kernel-exploitationWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/yaklang/hack-skills/kernel-exploitation)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/yaklang/hack-skills/kernel-exploitation"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/yaklang/hack-skills/kernel-exploitation/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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/yaklang/hack-skills/kernel-exploitation"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/yaklang/hack-skills/kernel-exploitation.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- Socket warn
- Snyk pass
- NVIDIA SkillSpector warn
SkillSpector: 5 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 YARA Match · line 105 YARA rule matched a hack tool or exploit indicator (offensive tools, reconnaissance, privilege escalation, or exploit frameworks).Fix: Remove offensive tool references and exploit code. Legitimate agent skills should not contain penetration testing tools, exploit frameworks, or reconnaissance utilities.
- high Tool Misuse · line 146 Tool parameters are crafted to achieve unintended or unsafe behavior. Parameter abuse can bypass intended safety checks (e.g. shell=True, --force, dangerous glob patterns).Fix: Validate all tool parameters against an allowlist. Reject dangerous parameter values (shell=True, --force, -rf /) and use safe defaults.
- high Tool Misuse · line 146 Tool calls are chained to bypass individual safety checks or escalate capabilities beyond what any single tool call would allow.Fix: Limit tool chaining depth and validate the output of each tool before passing it to the next. Require explicit user approval for multi-step chains.
- medium Privilege Escalation · line 146 Commands invoke sudo or root privileges. Verify this elevated access is necessary and justified.Fix: Avoid sudo/root unless strictly required. Prefer least-privilege patterns. If elevation is needed, document the justification and scope.
- low Privilege Escalation · line 38 Skill requests more permissions than appear necessary for its stated functionality. Review if elevated access is justified.Fix: Request only the minimum permissions required. Document why each permission is needed. Remove broad permissions like '*' or 'all'.
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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00054 | $0.02952 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00022 | $0.01181 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00011 | $0.00590 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00005 | $0.00295 |
Grade B, and why
kernel-exploitation scanned grade B with 2 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 1mo 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.
Asks for rootmediumPrivilege escalation
A mod that escalates privileges can change anything on the machine, not only the project.
echo 'cp /flag /tmp/flag && chmod 777 /tmp/flag' >> /tmp/x Makes network callslowCapability
Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.
wget https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/linux-6.1.tar.xz Copies of this mod
6 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:
- kernel-exploitation — 100% identical, 0 lines differ
- kernel-exploitation — 100% identical, 0 lines differ
- kernel-exploitation — 100% identical, 0 lines differ
- kernel-exploitation — 100% identical, 0 lines differ
- kernel-exploitation — 100% identical, 0 lines differ
- kernel-exploitation — 95% identical, 4 lines differ
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 308 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
SKILL: Linux Kernel Exploitation — Expert Attack Playbook
AI LOAD INSTRUCTION: Expert kernel exploitation techniques. Covers environment setup (QEMU), vulnerability classes, privilege escalation targets, kernel ROP, ret2usr, stack pivoting, and cross-cache attacks. Distilled from ctf-wiki kernel-mode sections and real-world kernel CVEs. Base models often confuse user-mode and kernel-mode exploitation constraints, especially regarding SMEP/SMAP/KPTI.
0. RELATED ROUTING
- binary-protection-bypass — userspace protections (NX, ASLR) also apply in kernel context
- stack-overflow-and-rop — kernel ROP reuses many userspace ROP concepts
- heap-exploitation — kernel SLUB is conceptually related to userspace heap
- linux-privilege-escalation — non-exploit kernel privesc techniques
Advanced References
- KERNEL_MITIGATION_BYPASS.md — KASLR, SMEP, SMAP, KPTI, FG-KASLR, CFI bypass techniques
- KERNEL_HEAP_TECHNIQUES.md — SLUB internals, cross-cache attacks, msg_msg/pipe_buffer/sk_buff exploitation
1. EXPLOITATION MODEL
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ 1. Find Vulnerability │
│ (UAF, OOB, race, integer overflow, type confusion)│
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ 2. Build Primitive │
│ (arbitrary read, arbitrary write, controlled RIP)│
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ 3. Bypass Mitigations │
│ (KASLR, SMEP, SMAP, KPTI) │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ 4. Escalate Privileges │
│ (commit_creds, modprobe_path, namespace escape) │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ 5. Return to Userspace Cleanly │
│ (KPTI trampoline, iretq/sysretq, swapgs) │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
What ships with it
2 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.
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.
- 1mo ago First seen · 308 lines · 54 tokens per session scan B 9f5deef00930
kernel-exploitation is a skill published in the GitHub repository yaklang/hack-skills (2,521 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 54 tokens to every session and 2,952 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it B with 2 findings (asks for root, 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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