On 14 June 2026 I cloned cisco-ai-defense/skill-scanner, set up the locked uv environment, and worked through one small but important question: what does it take to make the REST API safer when the API can scan local directories, accept uploaded ZIP files, run optional analyzers, and queue batch work in the background?
I am not pretending this is a universal API security methodology, or that one branch makes a whole product "secure" in the abstract. This is a narrower story, and I think the narrowness is the useful part: a concrete pass over one public Python repository, with a hardening branch called codex/harden-api-scan-boundaries, ending in commit 2cfa313 and draft PR #119, where the evidence was code, tests, docs, and a graph of the repository rather than a confident read of the obvious files.
The branch changed 24 files, with 1186 insertions and 210 deletions. The main implementation files were skill_scanner/api/router.py, skill_scanner/core/analyzer_factory.py, skill_scanner/core/extractors/content_extractor.py, skill_scanner/core/loader.py, and skill_scanner/core/scanner.py, plus two new shared modules: skill_scanner/core/archive_limits.py and skill_scanner/core/fs_limits.py.
