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.
By Zihao Zhu, Siwei Lyu, Adel Bibi, Baoyuan Wu
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...
By Haoran Ou, Gelei Deng, Xuanye Zhang, Wenbo Guo, Tianwei Zhang, Kwok-Yan Lam
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.
By Mingxiao Liu, Zhoumian Jiang, Jianan Ma, Jian Zhang, Jialuo Chen, Xinhao Deng, Zhen Wang
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.
By Yi Xie, Jiawei Du, Yu Cheng, Jiuan Zhou, Zhaoxia Yin
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.
By Wenxin Wu, Lingyong Yan, Lei Sha, Shuaiqiang Wang, Jiashu Zhao
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...
By Xiaofang Yang, Ziqi Miao, Dianbo Sui, Jing Shao, Lijun Li