--- name: supply-chain-risk-auditor description: "Audits a project's dependencies for supply-chain risk: version-matched advisories for direct dependencies and the full lockfile tree, abandoned or archived upstreams, npm publisher concentration, and install-time script execution. Use when asked to audit dependencies, assess supply-chain or third-party package risk, or review a dependency tree before an engagement." allowed-tools: Read Write Bash Glob Grep --- # Supply Chain Risk Auditor Generates a supply-chain risk report for a project's direct dependencies (npm, PyPI, Go), plus an advisory sweep of everything its lockfile resolves. Two deterministic scripts do the measuring; your job is the judgment they refuse to automate. ## Why the scripts do the measuring, not you Every figure in this report is a claim about somebody else's project, and hand-collected figures were measured wrong before this skill was rebuilt around scripts: GitHub contributor counts said five-plus people maintain `lodash` where npm's ACL says one, and `gh` saw zero downloads for a package that moves 164 million a week. Do not estimate maintainer counts, downloads, staleness, or CVE history from `gh`, web search, or memory — run the collector, and quote what it measured. The scripts enforce two rules worth knowing before you read their output: - **Unavailable data is never evidence of risk.** Every criterion resolves to assessed-clean, assessed-flagged, or unassessable-with-a-reason. - **An absent measurement is never a clean verdict.** A run that measured nothing exits non-zero instead of printing a report that finds nothing. ## Workflow 1. Confirm the target directory has manifests: `package.json`, `pyproject.toml`, `requirements*.txt`, or `go.mod`. If none exist, say so and stop — do not audit an ecosystem this collector does not parse by hand. Lockfiles read for exact versions and the transitive sweep: `package-lock.json`/`npm-shrinkwrap.json`, `uv.lock`, and a go 1.17+ `go.mod`. `yarn.lock`, `pnpm-lock.yaml`, and `poetry.lock` are not read — the report says so when they are present, and versions fall back to pins or the latest release. 2. Check `gh auth status`. Unauthenticated GitHub allows 60 requests/hour against 5,000, and the collector makes several per dependency; expect repository criteria to come back unassessable without it. Say so rather than fixing it silently. 3. Collect, then render. Put outputs somewhere outside the audited repository unless asked otherwise: ```sh uv run {baseDir}/scripts/collect.py --json /findings.json uv run {baseDir}/scripts/render.py /findings.json --out /report.md ``` Expect a few minutes for ~50 dependencies — several HTTP requests per dependency, more with many Go modules, and slower without authenticated `gh`. If `collect.py` exits non-zero, it is refusing to report — relay its message verbatim instead of retrying or working around it. 4. Read `report.md` and `findings.json`. The report is the deliverable; the JSON carries the datum behind every verdict when you need to cite one. 5. Add what the collector cannot, clearly separated from what it measured: - A short narrative for this reader: what to act on first, and why. - Upgrade paths for advisory findings — check whether the fix is a patch or a major version away. - Replacement candidates for abandoned or archived dependencies. Verify a candidate exists in the registry before naming it, and label these as judgment, not measurement. - For flagged install scripts: whether `npm ci --ignore-scripts` is viable for this project's build. ## Style for what you add Write added prose the way a security report reads, and apply the same register to the report addendum and the final reply alike — replies get pasted into tickets and reports verbatim. State the finding, the datum behind it, and the action. - Impersonal and declarative: no first or second person ("I ran the collector", "you should upgrade"), no contractions, no exclamation points. - Active voice, with the subject matter as the actor: "upgrading to 1.19.0 clears all 25 advisories", not "it is recommended that axios be upgraded". - Objective: no intensifiers or subjective framing ("very", "significant", "fortunately"), and no guesses about why the project chose what it chose. - Tense: past for what the audit did, present for the state of the dependencies, future for the consequences of acting or not. - Constructive: a recommendation names the action and its cost, never a culprit. If the `report-writing:writing-style` skill is available in the session, follow it — it is the full version of this register. The rendered report carries facts only. The interpretive rules below are instructions to you, not content for the reader — do not copy them into the deliverable as caveats or framing. ## Reading the report - **Unassessable is not risk.** PyPI publishes no maintainer ACL and Go has no registry; those rows say what could not be known, not what is wrong. - **The coverage table bounds every claim.** "No advisories" means "none among what was assessed" — check the assessed count before repeating a clean verdict. - **Quote figures verbatim.** Do not re-derive, round, or embellish the report's numbers; every one is reproducible from the artifact. - **Absence from the findings is not endorsement.** A dependency with no findings was measured against these criteria only. ## Rationalizations to reject - "`gh` can give me maintainer counts faster than the collector." Measured wrong — repo contributors and registry publish rights are different populations. - "No findings, so the dependencies are safe." Read the coverage table; on PyPI and Go, half the criteria are structurally unassessable. - "The unassessable rows would just confuse the reader; I'll drop them." They are the boundary of every claim in the report. Dropping them turns partial coverage into a clean bill of health, which is the failure this skill was rebuilt to prevent. - "The version is probably close enough." A range checked at latest-release and a lockfile-resolved version are different claims; the report labels which one it makes. Keep the label. ## When not to use - License compliance auditing. - Scanning the target's own source for vulnerabilities or secrets — this skill never reads dependency source, only registry, advisory, and repository metadata. - Judging whether the project installs or builds. The audit is designed to work from nothing more than the dependency list — manifests and lockfiles — and never installs, builds, or executes anything. Broken installs and import-time breakage are out of scope, and worth saying so if the user seems to expect them. - Ecosystems other than npm, PyPI, and Go; say the ecosystem is unsupported rather than improvising an audit for it.