v15.3.0 "Security Boundaries and Maintainer Reliability"

[15.3.0] - 2026-07-22 - "Security Boundaries and Maintainer Reliability"

Hardened AAS Core, skill distribution, the hosted catalog, and protected maintenance and release workflows; resolved current dependency advisories and the native Windows preview failure reported in discussion #956 without changing the 1,987-skill catalog.

Start here:

• AAS Core setup: configure the exact aas runtime with the Core guide
• Direct skill distribution: npx agentic-awesome-skills
• Choose your tool
• Best skills by tool
• Bundles
• Workflows

Changed

• Expanded semantic-review and merge evidence from SKILL.md to every tracked file under a canonical skill subtree, including nested examples, scripts, lockfiles, references, assets, deletions, and plugin skill mirrors. Deleted or otherwise unresolvable skill trees now require exact-head manual review instead of silently producing a successful no-skill result.
• Restricted sensitive same-repository action approval to owner-authored PRs with exact 40-character reviewed-head attestation, and made protected release publication accept exactly one same-repository, owner-authored PR with the expected title, base, and release/vX.Y.Z branch.
• Marked anywrite and sshepherd blocked in Codex and Claude plugin distributions until users provide separately installed, reviewed executables by explicit absolute path; the canonical source skills remain in the catalog.
• Hardened cloudflare-security-audit, hf-cloud-aws-context-discovery, pptx-deck-creation, and weaviate-cookbooks against cross-repository evidence reuse, credential exposure, prompt injection from design references, and predictable temporary installer paths.

Fixed

• Fixed native Windows Codex configuration preview so ACL checks pass paths through the environment, tolerate unresolved inherited ACE names, and return bounded path, phase, and status diagnostics for AAS_ADAPTER_WINDOWS_ACL_FAILED.
• Hardened AAS Core runtime state: validate the complete cache-ancestor chain, bound per-session manifest state to 128 entries, preserve broader neutral search results for exact-ID queries, and surface directory-durability failures during transactional cleanup.
• Removed the catalog markdown URL bypass, required exact release metadata in llms.txt, and rejected symlinked or escaping files in the legacy Pages redirect verifier.
• Fixed changed-skill evidence for arbitrary nested bundle files, full-directory Tessl fingerprints, deleted skill trees, canonical-sync Pages suppression, and workflow and documentation contract drift; canonical synchronization no longer dispatches release-only Pages builds.
• Updated brace-expansion to 1.1.16, body-parser to 1.20.6, and fast-uri to 3.1.4, resolving the live Dependabot findings and affected npm audit results.
• Pinned published README links to the release-specific AAS Core guide and made release-state synchronization preserve that immutable version binding.

Who should care

• Native Windows Codex users configuring AAS Core.
• Maintainers merging skill bundles, canonical syncs, or protected releases.
• Users of plugin distributions and security, cloud, and deck-generation skills.
• Operators relying on Core cache, transaction, evidence, or legacy Pages verification boundaries.

Validation

• Passed canonical skill and reference validation, documentation security checks, workflow linting, warning-budget enforcement, repository tests, web tests and build, deterministic regeneration, protected CI, and CodeQL on the merged source and canonical-sync commits.
• Confirmed all six tracked lockfile surfaces report zero known npm vulnerabilities before release preparation, with zero open Dependabot, code-scanning, or secret-scanning alerts.
• The release gate will verify tag, GitHub Release, npm latest, the release-only Pages deployment, live catalog and legacy bridge, and every already-configured AAS MCP host against the exact released commit.

Credits

• @SpecializedBaby for reporting the native Windows Codex ACL preview failure in discussion #956.