arXiv AI
Aug 11
ColluSkill: Adversarial Cross-Skill Composition for Evading Agent Skill Scanners
arXiv:2608. 09732v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agent skills are emerging as an important attack surface in LLM-based agent systems.
Stealth Apart, Harm Together: Skill Cascading Attacks on Skill-Based Agent Systems
The paper introduces skill cascading attacks, where a malicious goal is spread across multiple seemingly benign skills, causing harmful outcomes when combined. It presents SkillCascade, an automated red‑teaming framework, and releases SkillCascade‑Bench, a benchmark of 213 validated cascading test cases across various agent systems and domains. Experiments show that these cascaded interactions reliably induce harmful behaviors while evading existing per‑skill scanners and runtime monitors, revealing a gap between component‑level integrity and system‑level safety.
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arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31
SkillSafetyBench: Evaluating Agent Safety under Skill-Facing Attack Surfaces
arXiv:2605.12015v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reusable skills are becoming a common interface for extending large language model agents, packaging procedural guidance with access to files...
arXiv AI
Jun 17
SkillJect: Effectively Automating Skill-Based Prompt Injection for Skill-Enabled Agents
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 AI
Jun 2
Benchmarking Security Risk Detection and Verification in Open Agentic Skill Ecosystems
arXiv:2606. 00925v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Open agent platforms allow community contributors to publish reusable skills that agents can invoke at runtime.
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 22
OpenSkillRisk: Benchmarking Agent Safety When Using Real-World Risky Third-Party Skills
LLM-based agents leverage third-party skills to extend their capabilities in open-world scenarios. However, third-party skills can introduce extra security vulnerabilities, as seemingly harmless skills can contain latent safety risks that only emerge during actual execution.
arXiv AI
Aug 24
ClawSentry: A Progressive Multi-Tier Security Monitor for Safeguarding Autonomous LLM Agents
ClawSentry is an open‑source, framework‑agnostic security supervision gateway designed to protect autonomous large language model (LLM) agents from progressive risks that can arise at four points in the agent control loop: skill admission, invocation‑time intent, execution‑time effect, and post‑action consequence. It introduces a multi‑tier decision engine—deterministic L1, rule‑anchored L2, and read‑only L3—alongside a First‑Use Skill Package Review (FSPR) and an Agent Harness Protocol (AHP) that applies a single policy across multiple agent runtimes without modifying their internals. Evaluation on SkillInject and the SkillsSafety benchmark shows that ClawSentry significantly reduces contextual adversarial skill risk (ASR) while maintaining high task success rates (TSR).
arXiv AI
Sep 10
AgentLeak: Cloning Stronger LLM Agent Capabilities onto Weaker Agents Beyond Skill Stealing
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 AI
Jul 7
CONTRA: Red-Teaming Configurations of Personalizable Agents
arXiv:2607. 03220v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent tools such as OpenClaw have extended the capabilities of LLM-based agents from simple dialog-based systems to fully autonomous agents.
arXiv AI
Jun 19
The Autonomy Tax: Defense Training Breaks LLM Agents
arXiv:2603. 19423v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on external tools (file operations, API calls, database transactions) to autonomously complete complex multi-step tasks.
arXiv AI
Aug 11
SkillsMetric: Mapping the Detection Boundary of Static Analysis for Malicious Agent Skills
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 AI
Sep 2
Defense-as-Skill: Evolving Runtime Guard Skill for Skill-Augmented Agents
arXiv:2609.01487v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Skill-augmented agents load reusable skills as persistent runtime context, improving task performance but also giving malicious skills a durable chan...
arXiv AI
Jun 16
Benign in Isolation, Harmful in Composition: Security Risks in Agent Skill Ecosystems
arXiv:2606. 15242v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Skills are becoming the capability layer through which LLM agents turn plans into actions, but their use introduces security risks such as data leakage, unauthorized operations, and tool misuse.