Security reviewer

Security Reviewer

Reviews code for security issues before they reach production. Not a deep penetration test — that's a different discipline. This skill catches the issues that architect skills already encode rules against; it's the safety net. Findings table, severity rubric, and tooling reference in RECIPES.md.

1. When to invoke

• User asks "review this for security", "audit", "is this safe", "any security issues".
• Pre-release review of a service touching auth, payments, PII, or external integration.
• After dependency updates that include security advisories.
• New endpoint, new auth flow, new SQL query — anything where the failure mode is "data leaks" or "user gets owned".

2. Output format

Structured findings report — one row per finding with severity, rule, location, evidence, and fix. Layout + severity rubric + closing summary in RECIPES § 1–2.

3. Review approach

Two passes:

1. Tool pass — run static analyzers, then read their output. They catch low-hanging fruit fast.
2. Read pass — read the actual diff (or files in scope), checking the categories in §4. Tools miss intent.

The read pass is where most real findings come from. Tools surface patterns; humans understand context.

4. What to check — by category

Injection

• SQL injection. Per sql-architect §4 and §8: every query uses parameter binding. Grep for f-strings, format-strings, concatenation in SQL. WHERE id = '${userId}' is a fail; WHERE id = $1 is a pass.
• Command injection. Any subprocess.run(..., shell=True), os.system, exec.Command("sh", "-c", userInput). Use list-form args.
• Template injection. Jinja2(autoescape=False) or html/template bypassed via template.HTML(userInput).
• LDAP / NoSQL / regex injection. Anything that builds a query from user input without escaping is a candidate.

Auth & authz

• Per rest-api-architect §11 — Pattern A (in-house JWT) or B (external IdP). Verify implementation matches.
• Argon2id for password hashing (not bcrypt, never MD5/SHA1).
• JWT signing algorithm pinned (jwt.WithValidMethods([]string{"HS256"}) Go / algorithms=["HS256"] Python) — never algorithms=["HS256", "none"], never accept the alg the token claims.
• aud and iss verified for external IdP tokens.
• Tokens not in URLs, only in Authorization: Bearer headers.
• 401 vs 403 distinction maintained.
• No tenant-id from request body; derive from authenticated context. customer_id in a JSON payload is a take-over vector.
• Authorization checked per endpoint, not assumed by middleware. Per fastapi-architect §6 / gin-architect §7 / nethttp-architect §8: scopes/roles enforced per-route.

Secrets

• No secrets in code. Run gitleaks over the diff + the whole history.
• No secrets in env files committed to git. Only .env.local (gitignored) holds secrets.
• No secrets in Dockerfile layers. Per docker-architect §4: build-time secrets via --mount=type=secret; runtime via orchestrator.
• No secrets in logs. Per observability-architect §7: redaction filters configured.
• Rotation. If a secret was ever committed, rotate it — even if "we removed it later". Git history is forever.

Insecure defaults

• CORS: never Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * for authenticated endpoints. Explicit allow-list.
• HTTPS only. Reject plaintext at the load balancer / Strict-Transport-Security header set.
• Security headers present: X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff, Content-Security-Policy (for HTML), Referrer-Policy: no-referrer.
• Cookies: HttpOnly, Secure, SameSite=Lax (or Strict where compatible).
• Default-deny in IAM. Roles grant specific permissions; nothing is "allow all" except the operator break-glass account.
• Container runs as non-root (per docker-architect §1).

Deserialization and parsing

• No pickle.loads on untrusted data. Python's pickle is RCE-by-design.
• No yaml.load(s) — use yaml.safe_load(s).
• JSON: strict — json.NewDecoder(r.Body).DisallowUnknownFields() (Go), model_config = ConfigDict(extra="forbid") (Pydantic).
• XML: disable external entities (XXE) — defusedxml (Python) or xml.disable_external_entities style config.

CSRF, SSRF, IDOR

• CSRF: for cookie-authenticated browser endpoints, double-submit token or SameSite=Strict cookies. Bearer-token APIs don't need CSRF protection.
• SSRF: outbound HTTP from server-side code that takes a user-supplied URL must validate — block private IP ranges (10.0.0.0/8, 192.168.0.0/16, 127.0.0.0/8, 169.254.169.254 AWS metadata), enforce HTTPS, restrict to an allow-list.
• IDOR (insecure direct object reference): every resource lookup checks ownership. GET /v1/orders/{id} returns 404 if the order isn't the caller's, not 403 (don't leak existence).

Rate limiting and abuse

• Rate limit at the edge (gateway / CDN / WAF) plus per-endpoint critical-path limits.
• Per-caller, not per-IP — IPs are unreliable identity.
• Login endpoints rate-limited aggressively to prevent credential stuffing. Lock the account after N failures within a window.
• Account enumeration: signup/login error messages don't disclose whether a user exists. "Invalid credentials" — not "user not found".

Dependency hygiene

• trivy image + trivy fs in CI per docker-architect §10. Fail on HIGH/CRITICAL.
• Renovate-managed updates per repo-tooling-architect §7. Security updates land immediately.
• Lockfiles committed. go.sum, uv.lock, package-lock.json — never edit by hand.
• No :latest tags in Dockerfiles. Digest-pin in production.

5. Tooling

gitleaks, semgrep, gosec, bandit, trivy, npm audit / pip-audit — full reference + when each catches what + where to wire them in RECIPES § 3.

6. What this skill does NOT do

• Penetration testing. Black-box attack simulation against a running service is a different skill set and requires explicit authorization.
• Threat modeling. Architecture-level "what attacker types can affect this system" lives in improve-codebase-architecture territory or a dedicated workshop.
• Compliance audit. SOC 2 / HIPAA / PCI-DSS specifics need a compliance specialist.

This skill stops at code- and configuration-level findings. Findings that imply deeper work flag that explicitly: "recommendation: full threat-model session with the team that owns Payments."

7. Cross-skill ties

• rest-api-architect §10–11 — REST security conventions reviewers verify against.
• sql-architect §4 & §8 — parameter binding, RLS for multi-tenancy.
• docker-architect §4 & §10 — image security baseline + Trivy scanning.
• observability-architect §7 — PII / secret redaction in signals.
• repo-tooling-architect §5 & §7 — gitleaks in pre-commit, Renovate for security updates.
• commit-author — security fix commits use fix(scope): ... with BREAKING CHANGE footer if API behavior changes.