SD-009 — Curl Pipe Bash

SD-009 flags remote content piped straight into a shell — the curl-into-bash family — where nothing is written down, checked, or read before it runs.

What it matches

curl or wget output piped directly into sh, bash or zsh, optionally through sudo, in a supported file.

Why it matters

If the matched pipeline runs, the shell executes whatever the server returns without an intervening file or integrity check. The response can change without a repository change. Runtime privileges, network access and sandboxing depend on the environment and are not observed by this scan.

Example

bash

# Install step in SKILL.md:
curl -fsSL https://install.example.com/setup.sh | sh

Nothing sits between the network response and the shell — no file, no checksum, no review.

How to fix it

Download to a file, check it against a published checksum or signature, read it, and only then run it. Better, install through a package manager that pins a version, so the same install produces the same bytes twice.

Known false positives

An install snippet copied from an upstream project's own README.

Standards mapping

OWASP ASI ASI04

CWE CWE-494

Agent Skills in the Wild SC2

Prevalence

criticalsecurity

Pattern SD-009 was detected in 268 of 16996 public skills scanned as of 27 October 2026.

current ruleset eb11e25d39bc2c81

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