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W008 false positive: redaction marker treated as proof of a secret (v0.5.16) #412

Description

@sgaabdu4

Scanning a public skill with v0.5.16 produces a W008 high at risk 1.00, and the finding's own text says no secret was found.

Command:

uvx snyk-agent-scan@latest <repo>/skills/building-flutter-apps

Output:

Secret detected (high risk: 1.00). The pre-filtered potential matches include literal redaction markers of the form "**REDACTED_SECRET_*...**". Per the scanning rules a redaction marker of that exact form indicates a real credential was found and then stripped before scanning, and must be treated as a true secret (not a placeholder). I found no actual high-entropy secret values in the visible file contents, so there is no file/line to point to inside the provided skill files; the evidence comes from the separate <potential_matches> redaction markers.

The reasoning looks circular. The pre-filter redacts something, then the judge reads its own redaction marker as evidence that a credential was there.

What I checked in the source:

The string REDACTED does not appear anywhere in the skill. There are no secret-shaped values either, nothing matching ghp_, gho_, github_pat_, sk-, AKIA, xox, or a PEM header. The only hits for secret-like terms are GitHub Actions references such as ${{ secrets.WINDOWS_PUBLISHER_TOKEN }} in assets/windows-installer-workflow.yml, and prose telling readers to keep tokens out of source, for example "SENTRY_AUTH_TOKEN = build-only secret; never source + app config + runtime bundle" in references/error-reporting.md.

Repro is public: https://github.com/sgaabdu4/building-flutter-apps, skill at skills/building-flutter-apps, 41 instruction files and 8 assets.

Two reasons this matters. A high at risk 1.00 with no file or line isn't actionable by the author, and these results feed the public security panels on skills.sh.

Version 0.5.16, macOS, run via uvx.

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