fix(yara): reduce packaged malware-signature false positives (#236)#247
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rodboev wants to merge 2 commits into
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fix(yara): reduce packaged malware-signature false positives (#236)#247rodboev wants to merge 2 commits into
rodboev wants to merge 2 commits into
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rng1995
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Jul 9, 2026
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[Automated SkillSpector Review]
Requesting changes. Runtime decoding preserves the built-in malware signatures and current CI is green, but malformed encoded rules are not fully contained. Non-ASCII input can raise ValueError and abort rule loading instead of being skipped. Normalize that error path and add a regression.
Signed-off-by: Rod Boev <rod.boev@gmail.com>
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Thanks for the review. I pushed a rework that keeps malformed encoded built-in YARA rules on the existing skip path:
I added regression coverage for both ASCII and non-ASCII malformed encoded payloads and reran the focused malformed/builtin/extra-rule test slice, the full static YARA test file, ruff check, and ruff format check. |
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Summary
SkillSpector should avoid shipping raw malware-signature rule source in a form that causes repository archives to look like malware payloads, while preserving the built-in YARA detector behavior those rules provide.
Closes #236
Root cause
The YARA analyzer compiled built-in rule files directly from
src/skillspector/yara_rules, includingmalware.yar. Those rule strings are benign detector material, but archive scanners can treat them as suspicious content when scanning the repository zip itself. A reviewer pass also found that malformed encoded built-in rule files could still fail before user-supplied extra rules were loaded.Diff Notes
malware.yarpackage file with an encoded built-in asset thatstatic_yaradecodes at load time, so the detector source no longer ships as plain rule text.YR1severity/category behavior.Scope
This does not remove malware detection, disable YARA, rename
--yara-rules-dir, or claim that external scanners are clean unless that live scanner proof is collected.Verification
.\.venv\Scripts\python.exe -m pytest tests/nodes/analyzers/test_static_yara.py -k "malformed or builtin_malware or extra_rules".\.venv\Scripts\python.exe -m pytest tests/nodes/analyzers/test_static_yara.pyuv run ruff check src/ tests/uv run ruff format --check src/ tests/