The paper "SkillBloat: Token Amplification Attacks via Skill Injection in LLM Coding Agents" investigates how agent skills—task‑specific instructions, scripts, and resources—can be exploited to create a trusted instruction channel that enables token amplification attacks. It introduces a two‑phase framework, SkillBloat, which first screens a library of attack‑type conditions across multiple amplification mechanisms and then refines the strongest candidate through LLM‑guided full‑document skill rewriting. Evaluated on a real‑world skill benchmark, SkillBloat achieves an average best amplification of 5.4184×–10.1455× across multiple coding‑agent target configurations, and an ablation study shows that the second‑stage refinement consistently improves performance over the initial screening alone.
arXiv:2602. 06547v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: LLM-based coding agents increasingly rely on third-party extensions called skills, which bundle natural language instructions and helper scripts that execute with full user privileges.
arXiv:2602. 06547v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: LLM-based coding agents increasingly rely on third-party extensions called skills, which bundle natural language instructions and helper scripts that execute with full user privileges.
arXiv:2602. 14211v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Agent skills extend LLM agents with task-specific instructions, executable scripts, and auxiliary resources, improving reusability but creating a new supply-chain attack surface.
arXiv:2608. 08468v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agent Skills---structured packages of instructions and scripts that augment LLM-based agents---are rapidly proliferating, yet their security properties remain under-explored.
arXiv:2606. 01567v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on reusable skills i.
arXiv:2608. 08303v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic skills improve large language model (LLM) agents by encoding reusable procedures for complex tasks.
The paper introduces AgentLeak, a black‑box attack that clones the task‑solving capabilities of a strong LLM agent onto a weaker one by exploiting differences between successful and failed executions. Unlike prior skill‑stealing methods that only recover explicit skill artifacts, AgentLeak identifies and incorporates missing procedural behaviors, boosting task pass rates by over 40% and closing more than 80% of the capability gap across 20 scenarios. The study demonstrates that observable execution behavior can leak proprietary procedural knowledge, posing a confidentiality risk for LLM agents.
arXiv:2608. 09732v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agent skills are emerging as an important attack surface in LLM-based agent systems.
arXiv:2608. 12273v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM agents increasingly rely on third-party skills, using natural-language descriptions for selection and instruction bodies for planning.
arXiv:2604. 06550v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Agent skills combine natural-language instructions with executable code while inheriting an agent's filesystem, credential, and network access.
arXiv:2609.36879v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As LLM-based agents perform increasingly complex tasks, Agent Skills have emerged as a flexible mechanism for extending their capabilities. An Agent...
RedEvoAgent is a black-box red‑teaming agent that transforms cross‑case attack trajectories into concise, human‑readable attack skills. It evolves these skills by profiling tool effectiveness, attributing tool credit, and applying a validation ratchet to keep only improvements. Experiments demonstrate that RedEvoAgent outperforms fixed and agentic baselines, enhances tool efficiency, and transfers across attacker models and target execution harnesses.