The paper titled "Pretext: Defeating Malicious Skill Detection Frameworks for AI Agents" demonstrates how an attacker can bypass current skill‑scanning defenses by crafting malicious skills that evade both static analysis and LLM‑based semantic checks. By moving malicious payloads into natural language and distributing instructions across files, the white‑box attacker named Pretext achieves high evasion rates—up to 97% against a frozen detector and 77% against a co‑adaptive one—across three open‑source models.
Skills extend an agent's capabilities by injecting instructions and information into the context, and are widely used by agents such as OpenClaw and Claude Code. Prior work shows third-party marketpla...
arXiv:2606. 00925v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Open agent platforms allow community contributors to publish reusable skills that agents can invoke at runtime.
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: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...
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:2606. 15899v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Open-source LLM agent ecosystems are growing rapidly, yet the security of community-contributed skills - modular tool definitions that extend agent capabilities - remains largely unvetted.
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.
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:2609.39065v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM agents increasingly rely on installable skills, which are packages of instructions, code, and resources that equip them with task-specific capabi...
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.
arXiv:2608. 09732v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agent skills are emerging as an important attack surface in LLM-based agent systems.
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.