When Safe Skills Collide: Measuring Compositional Risk in Agent Skill Ecosystems
arXiv:2606. 00448v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM agents increasingly rely on community-contributed skills that expand an agent's operational capability set.
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.
arXiv:2606. 00448v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM agents increasingly rely on community-contributed skills that expand an agent's operational capability set.
arXiv:2608. 09732v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agent skills are emerging as an important attack surface in LLM-based agent systems.
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...
arXiv:2608.30041v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model agents place outputs from external skills into their execution context, allowing attacker-controlled data to influence later pri...
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:2608. 16246v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous AI agents tackling Long Horizon Tasks depend on marketplace skills that are certified one at a time: a scanner returns a safety verdict for each skill and declares the ecosystem safe if every package passes.
The paper introduces a new skill poisoning technique for large language model agents that decouples the pretext (rationale) from the actuation (operation). By separating these two risk‑realization factors, the authors create coordinated pretext‑actuation skill pairs that allow malicious actions to remain hidden within legitimate agent behavior. An automated framework is presented to discover execution dependencies, synthesize these skill pairs, and refine them through closed‑loop feedback, achieving high attack success in both single‑session and persistent scenarios.
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: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: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:2606. 00925v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Open agent platforms allow community contributors to publish reusable skills that agents can invoke at runtime.
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.