Security Skill Promotion Checklist

Scope: Promoting a security skill (categories: [security]) from experimental → recommended. Governance authority lives in security-skill-governance.md; this checklist operationalizes its gates. Referenced by the PR template.

Security skills carry human_review_required: true, so promotion is never automatic and never admin-merged. A human security reviewer must confirm every item below before the status change merges.

Preconditions (must all be true)

• The skill has been experimental long enough to gather real usage/feedback.
• One skill per promotion PR (focused review — see governance "Human-review gates").
• The status change is the only behavioral change in the PR, or the PR is otherwise scoped to this skill.

Correctness & tests

• The skill's fixtures pass (tests/fixtures/… for this skill) in CI.
• The unsafe-shell scanner (scripts/scan_unsafe_shell.py) is clean for any shell the skill authors or embeds.
• Examples are concrete, realistic, and reproduce the documented behavior.

Governance frontmatter (deny-by-default)

• risk_tier is set to the highest plausible tier for the skill's blast radius.
• human_review_required: true.
• allowed_tools lists only what the skill needs (nothing speculative).
• network_policy, write_policy, script_policy are each at the tightest posture the skill can function with; any grant above deny is justified in the body.
• categories includes security (so the governance gate applies).

Provenance & safety

• If the skill drew on any public source, a completed intake record is referenced from the PR, and source_inspiration records url + license per entry.
• No copied scripts, prompt bodies, or full skill bodies from public sources (inspiration only — see governance "Public-source inspiration").
• Output contract defines prohibited_content (no secrets / PII / CUI / internal URLs).

Human sign-off

• A member of @GSA-TTS/agentic-coding-team has reviewed the skill as a security reviewer (not just CI).
• The PR carries the needs-human-review label.
• The reviewer can explain what the skill does and why the capability grants are appropriate.

Only when every box is checked may the skill's status change to recommended.