Scanning the Harness: An Empirical Study of Supply-Chain Defects in AI Coding-Agent Configurations

📅 2026-09-07
📈 Citations: 0
Influential: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
研究通过扫描3,171个GitHub仓库,检测AI编码代理配置中的供应链缺陷,使用独立实现和语言模型仲裁验证结果。
📝 Abstract
AI coding agents such as Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and OpenAI Codex are configured through artifacts developers write and share: instruction files, skills, hooks, MCP server declarations, subagents. This harness is a dependency layer installed from marketplaces and public repositories, running with the developer's privileges, with no lockfile, no install-time check, and no vocabulary for what a component may do. We study it over 3,171 public GitHub repositories: 2,660 setups that assemble two or more component types and 511 published skill collections. We measure only rules decidable from bytes whose consequence is a security exposure, a configuration that cannot work, or a departure from the Agent Skills specification, and validate every finding before it counts: an independent implementation re-derives it from the repository at its pinned commit, a language-model adjudicator with a released prompt rules on every disagreement, and a second independent model session re-checks every counted pair. Three security classes survive: 9.8% of setups install an MCP server with no version pinned, 3.1% pre-approve arbitrary execution behind a scoped-looking grant such as Bash(python:*), and 3.8% carry a skill that pre-approves the shell for whoever installs it. In total 16.0% of setups carry a security defect and 16.7% a confirmed defect of any kind, against a raw scanner rate of 25.5% on the same rules; the third class ships inside 3.7% of collections, where a marketplace scan can see it. Rules that compare two files detect differences that are usually intended and are reported as observations. No credential-exfiltration path was confirmed. The instrument, corpus manifest, prompt, and every verdict are released.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

AI coding agents
supply-chain defects
security exposure
configuration errors
Agent Skills specification
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

AI coding agents
security defects
configuration errors
empirical study
validation process
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