Dependency Auditor

A multi-language toolkit for analyzing, auditing, and managing dependencies. It scans manifests and lockfiles across 8+ ecosystems to surface vulnerabilities, classify licenses, detect bloat, and produce safe, phased upgrade plans — giving teams visibility into security, legal, and maintenance risk hidden in their dependency trees.

Core Capabilities

• Vulnerability scanning & CVE matching — match direct/transitive deps against a built-in CVE database with CVSS scoring across Node, Python, Go, Rust, Ruby, Java, PHP, .NET.
• License compliance — classify into permissive / weak-copyleft / strong-copyleft / proprietary / unknown tiers and detect incompatible combinations (e.g. GPL contamination).
• Outdated & maintenance detection — categorize updates by patch/minor/major severity; flag abandoned or end-of-life packages.
• Dependency bloat analysis — find unused, redundant, or oversized packages and consolidation opportunities.
• Upgrade path planning — semver breaking-change prediction, risk matrix, prioritization, rollback strategies.
• Supply chain security — provenance checks, typosquatting/malicious-package detection, transitive risk scoring.
• Lockfile analysis — validate freshness, integrity hashes, and cross-environment consistency for deterministic builds.

When to Use

• Auditing a project's dependencies for vulnerabilities or supply-chain risk.
• Checking license compliance before distribution or M&A due diligence.
• Planning safe, phased dependency upgrades.
• Adding a dependency security gate to CI/CD.
• Cleaning up unused or redundant dependencies.

Clarify First

Before running the audit, confirm these inputs. If any is unknown or vague, ASK — do not assume:

• Project & ecosystem — the project path and which manifests/lockfiles (the input the scanner parses)
• Audit focus — vulnerabilities, license compliance, or upgrade planning (selects dep_scanner.py vs license_checker.py vs upgrade_planner.py)
• Policy & gate — license policy strictness and fail-on-severity threshold (sets --policy, --fail-on-high, and the CI verdict)

Stop rule: ask only the 2-3 that most change the output. If the user says "just draft it," proceed and list your assumptions at the top of the artifact.

Tools

References

Load the reference that matches the task — keep this file lean and pull detail on demand:

• references/capabilities-and-best-practices.md — full breakdown of every analysis capability, the scanner/analyzer/planner internals, use cases by team, advanced/enterprise features, recommended scan cadences, and metrics/KPIs. Read when you need the deep capability or architecture detail.
• references/tools-integration-and-troubleshooting.md — quick-start and CI/CD/scheduled-audit integration commands, complete per-tool flag/output reference, the troubleshooting table, and success-criteria targets. Read when running the tools, wiring them into pipelines, or diagnosing failures.
• references/vulnerability_assessment_guide.md — how to assess, prioritize, and remediate dependency vulnerabilities (CVSS, exploitability, disclosure timelines). Read when triaging or responding to security findings.
• references/license_compatibility_matrix.md — comprehensive license-type reference and compatibility matrix for combining open-source dependencies. Read when resolving license conflicts or making distribution decisions.
• references/dependency_management_best_practices.md — strategic, governance, security, and operational best practices across the dependency lifecycle. Read when establishing dependency policy or team workflows.

Scope & Limitations

This skill covers:

• Parsing dependency manifests and lockfiles for JavaScript/Node.js, Python, Go, Rust, Ruby, Java, PHP, and C#/.NET ecosystems.
• Matching dependencies against a built-in vulnerability database of common CVE patterns with severity scoring.
• Classifying licenses into risk tiers (permissive, weak copyleft, strong copyleft, proprietary, unknown) and detecting conflicts.
• Generating prioritized, phased upgrade plans with breaking-change analysis, rollback procedures, and time estimates.

This skill does NOT cover:

• Real-time querying of live vulnerability databases (NVD, OSV, GitHub Advisory); the built-in DB is a representative subset. For continuous monitoring, see skill-security-auditor.
• Container image or OS-level package scanning. For infrastructure auditing, see ci-cd-pipeline-builder or observability-designer.
• Automated PR creation for dependency updates (Dependabot/Renovate-style); the skill produces plans and reports, not code changes.
• Runtime dependency analysis or dynamic import tracing; detection is static manifest/lockfile parsing only.

Integration Points