trailofbits__skills/plugins/yara-authoring

YARA-X Authoring Plugin

A behavior-driven skill for authoring high-quality YARA-X detection rules, teaching you to think and act like an expert YARA author.

YARA-X Focus: This skill targets YARA-X, the Rust-based successor to legacy YARA. YARA-X powers VirusTotal's Livehunt/Retrohunt production systems and is 5-10x faster for regex-heavy rules. Legacy YARA (C implementation) is in maintenance mode.

Philosophy

This skill doesn't dump YARA syntax at you. Instead, it teaches:

• Decision trees for common judgment calls (Is this string good enough? When to abandon an approach?)
• Expert heuristics (mutex names are gold, API names are garbage)
• Rationalizations to reject (the shortcuts that cause production failures)

An expert uses 5 tools: yarGen, FLOSS, yr CLI, signature-base, YARA-CI. Everything else is noise.

Installation

YARA-X CLI

# macOS
brew install yara-x

# Or from source
cargo install yara-x

# Verify installation
yr --version

Plugin

/plugin marketplace add trailofbits/skills
/plugin install yara-authoring

The scripts declare their dependencies with PEP 723 inline metadata, so uv run resolves the yara-x Python package on first use. No separate install step.

Skills

yara-rule-authoring

Guides authoring of YARA-X rules for malware detection with expert judgment.

Covers:

• Decision trees for string quality, when to abandon approaches, debugging FPs
• Expert heuristics from experienced YARA authors
• Rationalizations to reject (common shortcuts that fail)
• Naming conventions (CATEGORY_PLATFORM_FAMILY_DATE format)
• Performance optimization (atom quality, short-circuit conditions)
• Testing workflow (goodware corpus validation)
• YARA-X migration guide for converting legacy rules
• Chrome extension analysis with crx module
• Android DEX analysis with dex module

Triggers: YARA, YARA-X, malware detection, threat hunting, IOC, signature

Scripts

Two Python scripts under skills/yara-rule-authoring/scripts/, run with uv. Both accept a file or a directory, and both exit non-zero if the path yields no rules to inspect rather than reporting a clean run over nothing.

yara_lint.py

Compiles each rule with YARA-X, then checks style, metadata, and anti-patterns. See style-guide.md for the full code table.

uv run skills/yara-rule-authoring/scripts/yara_lint.py rule.yar
uv run skills/yara-rule-authoring/scripts/yara_lint.py --json rules/
uv run skills/yara-rule-authoring/scripts/yara_lint.py --strict rule.yar   # warnings fail too

atom_analyzer.py

Evaluates string quality for efficient atom extraction:

uv run skills/yara-rule-authoring/scripts/atom_analyzer.py rule.yar
uv run skills/yara-rule-authoring/scripts/atom_analyzer.py --verbose rule.yar

Both import yara_rules.py, a dependency-free module holding the parsing and analysis logic. test_yara_rules.py covers it; make python-tests picks it up.

Reference Documentation

Document	Purpose
style-guide.md	Naming conventions, metadata requirements
performance.md	Atom theory, optimization techniques
strings.md	String selection judgment, good/bad patterns
testing.md	Validation workflow, FP investigation

Key Resources

• YARA-X Documentation (official)
• YARA-X GitHub
• Neo23x0 YARA Style Guide
• Neo23x0 Performance Guidelines
• signature-base Rule Collection
• YARA-CI

Requirements

• Python 3.11+
• uv for running scripts
• YARA-X CLI (yr)

The scripts use PEP 723 inline metadata, so dependencies are resolved automatically by uv run.

Migrating from Legacy YARA

If you have existing rules written for legacy YARA:

1. Run validation: yr check --relaxed-re-syntax rules/
2. Fix issues identified (see SKILL.md migration section)
3. Validate without relaxed mode: yr check rules/

Note: Use --relaxed-re-syntax only as a temporary diagnostic tool. Fix all identified issues rather than relying on relaxed mode permanently.

Common migration issues:

• Unescaped { in regex patterns
• Invalid escape sequences (\R → \\R)
• Base64 patterns on strings < 3 characters
• Negative array indexing