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Agent workflow

How a coding agent should use secure-mcp for defensive, remediation-focused secure code review — a human summary of the master skill.

How a coding agent should use secure-mcp for defensive, remediation-focused secure code review.

Mandate

Defensive security audit only — remediation focused. Help the team identify potential weaknesses, classify them (CWE / severity / confidence), and recommend concrete remediation and verification. No exploit generation, no bypass guidance, no using discovered secrets.

The orchestration lives in one place

The full multi-phase workflow — preflight routing, goal/TODO, dispositions, progressive pack loading, and hardening mode — is the master skill at .agents/skills/secure-mcp/SKILL.md. That file is the single source of truth; this page is a human-readable summary, not a second playbook. On every call, the live MCP tool inventory and input schemas win over any committed doc.

Sequence at a glance

Phase 0  list_authorized_roots / list_projects
                                     → choose an allowlisted absolute project_root
Phase 1  list_project_structure      → inventory artifact (no packs yet)
Phase 2  analyze_architecture        → stacks + typed surfaces/gaps + recommended_packs + pack_batches
         get_knowledge_pack          → pack_batches[0] first (summary); later batches only if needed
         build_remediation_threat_model → evidence-backed assets/boundaries + controls (optional)
Phase 3  check_authentication
         analyze_injection_risks
         review_secrets              → category candidate artifacts
         run_local_scanners          → optional, default off
Phase 4  Manual / sub-agent data-flow → confirm candidates, assign dispositions
Phase 5  produce_findings            → prioritized remediation report

Progressive load rule: do not load knowledge packs until after architecture. Prefer pack_batches (max 6 pack ids per call), start with pack_batches[0] and detail=summary (fair sampling across packs). Use full or a higher max_items (hard max 60) only when drafting remediations.

Working defensively

  • Candidates are not findings. Open each cited file and trace source → control → sink before confirming. Assign a disposition (reportable, deferred, needs_review, suppressed, accepted_risk, not_applicable, fixed) with a reason and evidence; closed dispositions stay out of open risk and remediation_priority.
  • Coverage is honest. An empty findings array means no candidate was observed in the reviewed files only when coverage.not_observed_means is no_candidate_in_files_reviewed. Partial or truncated coverage must be reported and followed up, and zero-hit high-value surfaces sampled.
  • Stack-honest. A pure Expo/RN app never loads Next packs or surfaces, and a pure Next app never loads Expo/Swift packs or surfaces. Monorepos get the union of detected packages, reviewed per deployable project_root.
  • Secret-safe. Tool output is redacted and marked untrusted; never re-paste raw secrets, and recommend rotation for anything that may be live.
  • No false certainty. Never claim “the app is secure”; state the review boundary and remaining uncertainty, and end with actionable remediation.

Tools stay independently useful if the user asks about one category (for example secrets only) — still stay defensive and remediation-oriented.

Scoped diff reviews

focus_paths scopes inventory, architecture, and category tools. Resolve changed paths with host-agent git (git diff --name-only), filter build artifacts and lockfiles, map the rest to relative prefixes under project_root, and re-run architecture so surfaces and gaps match the PR surface. Respect max_files and coverage truncation — do not claim full-repo coverage from a focused pass.

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