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Rule Reference

SEC373lintai-ai-securitystableclaude_settingswarn

Claude settings: wildcard Edit permissions

Claude settings permissions allow `Edit(*)` in a shared committed config

Provider
lintai-ai-security
Surface
claude_settings
Scope
per_file
Tier
stable
Severity
warn
Confidence
high
Detection
structural
Remediation
message_only

Activation Model

Preset Membership

This rule is part of the builtin activation graph through these preset memberships.

Lifecycle

Stable Lifecycle Contract

State

stable_gated

Graduation rationale

Checks shared Claude settings permissions for explicit wildcard `Edit(*)` grants.

Deterministic signal basis

ClaudeSettingsSignals exact string detection for `Edit(*)` inside permissions.allow on parsed Claude settings JSON.

Malicious corpus
claude-settings-edit-wildcard
Benign corpus
claude-settings-edit-specific-safe
structured evidence required remediation reviewed
Canonical note

Structural stable rule intended as a high-precision check with deterministic evidence.

Nearby Signals

Related Rules

Why It Matters

SEC373 flags committed Claude settings files when permissions.allow contains the exact wildcard edit grant Edit(*).

This is useful because:

  • shared claude/settings.json or .claude/settings.json files often become team-wide policy by copy/paste
  • Edit(*) grants broad file-edit capability instead of a reviewed allowlist
  • broad edit access is hard to justify in code review when a workflow only needs a small scoped set of mutable paths

What Triggers

This rule applies only to committed Claude settings surfaces:

  • .claude/settings.json
  • claude/settings.json

It triggers when:

  • permissions.allow contains the exact string Edit(*)

It does not trigger on:

  • narrower reviewed patterns such as Edit(./docs/**)
  • fixture-like test/example paths

Examples

Bad:

json
{
  "permissions": {
    "allow": ["Edit(*)", "Read(*)"]
  }
}

Better:

json
{
  "permissions": {
    "allow": ["Edit(./docs/**)", "Read(*)"]
  }
}

Remediation

  • replace Edit(*) with specific reviewed edit patterns
  • scope shared edit permissions to the smallest set of repo paths the workflow actually needs