hermes-agent/tests/cron
Teknium ccd899318e
fix(cron): split scanner into two tiers so skill prose stops false-positiving (#32339)
The runtime cron prompt scanner (added in #3968 to plug the
"malicious skill carrying an injection payload" gap) reuses the same
critical-severity patterns as the create-time user-prompt scan against
the *assembled* prompt — which includes loaded skill markdown.

That works fine for narrow patterns like "ignore previous instructions"
which never legitimately appear in prose. It catastrophically false-
positives on command-shape patterns like `cat ~/.hermes/.env`,
`authorized_keys`, `/etc/sudoers`, and `rm -rf /`, which routinely
appear in security postmortems and runbooks as **descriptive prose**
about attacks, not as actual commands.

Concrete failure: the bundled `hermes-agent-dev` skill contains a
security postmortem section saying "the attacker could just
`cat ~/.hermes/.env`". Every PR-scout cron job that loaded this skill
was silently blocked with `Blocked: prompt matches threat pattern
'read_secrets'`. All 11 scout jobs failed for weeks.

Fix: split the scanner into two tiers and route by context:

  - `_scan_cron_prompt` (strict, unchanged behavior) runs against
    the small user-authored cron prompt at create/update and as a
    runtime defense-in-depth when no skills are attached. A legit
    user prompt has no business saying `cat .env`, so the strict
    patterns still apply there.

  - `_scan_cron_skill_assembled` (new, looser) runs against the
    assembled prompt when skills are attached. It only catches
    unambiguous prompt-injection directives ("ignore previous
    instructions", "disregard your rules", "system prompt override",
    "do not tell the user") plus invisible-unicode markers. Command-
    shape patterns are dropped because they false-positive on prose.

This is defense-in-depth, not the only line of defense. Skill bodies
are already scanned at install time by `skills_guard.py`; the runtime
cron scan exists purely as a tripwire for an obvious injection
directive surviving a malicious install. Catching prose mentions of
commands was never the goal of #3968 — the test that planted a skill
containing `cat ~/.hermes/.env` was the wrong shape of test for the
threat model.

Tests:
- `_scan_cron_prompt` strict behavior preserved (56 existing tests
  unchanged: bare `cat .env`, `rm -rf /`, etc. still block).
- New `TestScanCronSkillAssembled` class verifies the looser scanner:
  injection / disregard / system-override / do-not-tell-the-user /
  invisible-unicode still block; descriptive prose about attack
  commands is allowed; GitHub auth-header allowlist still works.
- `test_skill_with_env_exfil_payload_raises` (planted `cat .env`
  in skill body) replaced with `test_skill_with_env_exfil_command
  _in_prose_is_allowed` documenting the new correct behavior with
  the real-world postmortem-style example that triggered the bug.
- All 11 originally-failing PR-scout jobs validated end-to-end via
  `_build_job_prompt` — assembled prompts now build successfully
  with the `hermes-agent-dev` skill attached.

Total: 75/75 tests in cron + cronjob_tools + threat scanner pass;
544/544 across the wider cron / memory / threat-pattern surface.
2026-05-25 18:20:45 -07:00
..
__init__.py test: add unit tests for 8 modules (batch 2) 2026-02-26 13:54:20 +03:00
test_codex_execution_paths.py refactor(session-log): delete _save_session_log and all callers 2026-05-20 11:44:10 -07:00
test_compute_next_run_last_run_at.py fix(cron): use last_run_at as croniter base for cron jobs 2026-04-29 08:24:48 -07:00
test_cron_context_from.py fix: add cron API provenance logging (#24889) 2026-05-25 01:15:56 -07:00
test_cron_inactivity_timeout.py fix(cron): fall back gracefully when HERMES_CRON_TIMEOUT is invalid 2026-04-29 08:21:04 -07:00
test_cron_no_agent.py chore: ruff auto-fix PLR6201 resweep — tuple → set in membership tests (#27355) 2026-05-17 02:29:41 -07:00
test_cron_profile.py test(cron): cover profile + workdir combined scenario 2026-05-18 17:39:50 +00:00
test_cron_prompt_injection_skill.py fix(cron): split scanner into two tiers so skill prose stops false-positiving (#32339) 2026-05-25 18:20:45 -07:00
test_cron_script.py test: remove 50 stale/broken tests to unblock CI (#22098) 2026-05-08 14:55:40 -07:00
test_cron_workdir.py fix(cron): keep SOUL.md identity when workdir is unset 2026-04-29 08:10:25 -07:00
test_file_permissions.py refactor(tests): re-architect tests + fix CI failures (#5946) 2026-04-07 17:19:07 -07:00
test_jobs.py fix(cron): reject id mutation + validate output paths under OUTPUT_DIR 2026-05-25 01:15:24 -07:00
test_rewrite_skill_refs.py fix(curator): rewrite cron job skill refs after consolidation (#18253) 2026-04-30 23:04:50 -07:00
test_scheduler.py fix(cron): layer agent.disabled_toolsets onto cron baseline (#25752) 2026-05-25 01:09:54 -07:00
test_scheduler_mcp_init.py test: remove 50 stale/broken tests to unblock CI (#22098) 2026-05-08 14:55:40 -07:00