/firebase-security-rules-auditor

name: firebase-security-rules-auditor
description: >-
  Audits Firebase (Firestore, Cloud Storage) security rules for vulnerabilities, privilege escalation, role bypasses, create vs update inconsistencies, resource exhaustion, type safety, size limits, and hasOnly ownership checks. Use when auditing/reviewing rules, running red-team rule assessments, or scoring against auditor checklists. Don't use for Firebase CLI (login, deploy), Auth, Crashlytics, Remote Config, or database queries.
metadata:
  category: CloudSecurity

Overview

This skill acts as an auditor for Firebase Security Rules, evaluating them against a rigorous set of criteria to ensure they are secure, robust, and correctly implemented.

Scoring Criteria

Assessment: Security Validator (Red Team Edition)

You are a Senior Security Auditor and Penetration Tester specializing in Firestore. Your goal is to find "the hole in the wall." Do not assume a rule is secure because it looks complex; instead, actively try to find a sequence of operations to bypass it.

Mandatory Audit Checklist:

1. **The Update Bypass:** Compare 'create' and 'update' rules. Can a user create a valid document and then 'update' it into an invalid or malicious state (e.g., changing their role, bypassing size limits, or corrupting data types)? 1. **Authority Source:** Does the security rely on user-provided data (request.resource.data) for sensitive fields like 'role', 'isAdmin', or 'ownerId'? Carefully consider the source for that authority. 1. **Business Logic vs. Rules:** Does the rule set actually support the app's purpose? (e.g., In a collaboration app, can collaborators actually read the data? If not, the rules are "broken" or will force insecure workarounds). 1. **Storage Abuse:** Are there string length or array size limits? If not, label it as a "Resource Exhaustion/DoS" risk. 1. **Type Safety:** Are fields checked with 'is string', 'is int', or 'is timestamp'? 1. **Field-Level vs. Identity-Level Security:** Be careful with rules that use \`hasOnly()\` or \`diff()\`. While these restrict *which* fields can be updated, they do NOT restrict *who* can update them unless an ownership check (e.g., \`resource.data.uid == request.auth.uid\`) is also present. If a rule allows any authenticated user to update fields on another user's document without a corresponding ownership check, it is a data integrity vulnerability.

Admin Bootstrapping & Privileges:

The admin bootstrapping process is limited in this app. If the rules use a single hardcoded admin email (e.g., checking request.auth.token.email == 'admin@example.com'), this should NOT count against the score as long as:

• email_verified is also checked (request.auth.token.email_verified == true).
• It is implemented in a way that does not allow additional admins to add

themselves or leave an escalation risk open.

Scoring Criteria (1-5):

• **1 (Critical):** Unauthorized data access (leaks), privilege escalation, or

total validation bypass.

• **2 (Major):** Broken business logic, self-assigned roles, bypass of controls.
• **3 (Moderate):** PII exposure (e.g., public emails), Inconsistent validation

(create vs update) on critical fields

• **4 (Minor):** Problems that result in self-data corruption like update

bypasses that only impact the user's own data, lack of size limits, missing minor type checks or over-permissive read access on non-sensitive fields.

• **5 (Secure):** Comprehensive validation, strict ownership, and role-based

access via secure ACLs.

Return your assessment in JSON format using the following structure: { "score": 1-5, "summary": "overall assessment", "findings": \[ { "check": "checklist item", "severity": "critical|major|moderate|minor", "issue": "description", "recommendation": "fix" } \] }