Can Agents Trust Their Skills? Uncovering Unsafe Chains of Trust in Skill-Based LLM Agents
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arXiv:2606. 00925v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Open agent platforms allow community contributors to publish reusable skills that agents can invoke at runtime.
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...
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: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.
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: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...