Agent Skill Security Auditing

Overview

Agent skill security auditing studies whether reusable instructions, code, and tools behave as intended and stay within an agent’s authorized scope. Auditors combine static checks such as pattern matching and data-flow analysis with semantic review of natural-language instructions, sandboxed execution, and runtime monitoring. Benchmarks increasingly test complete agent trajectories, skill dependencies, and compositions, since individually benign skills can interact to cause unsafe actions. A central challenge is balancing high detection recall with false positives and reliable performance on unfamiliar skills, adaptive attacks, and different agent frameworks.

Latest papers

CardsList

66 papers11 papers in the last four weeks, up 120% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. SkillLifeBench: Benchmarking Security Across the Lifecycle of Agent Skills

    Oct 26, 2026Chenxu Zhang, Zhou Liu, Wu Xin +1AI Agent Security BenchmarksLLM Agent Evaluation

  2. CoSA: The Conflict of Skills Attack in Real-World LLM Agent Ecosystems

    Oct 26, 2026Yujia Zheng, Tianhao Li, Shangzhi Xu +6LLM Agent SecurityLLM Agent Safety

  3. SEEK: Skill Extraction with Evolving Knowledge against Frontier Science Agents

    Oct 25, 2026Cheng Gui, Xiang Zheng, Yutao Wu +5AI Agent SecurityAgent Skill Security Auditing

  4. CoRedSkill: Stealthy Skill Composition Attacks via AST-Guided Injection

    Oct 14, 2026Qichen Zhao, Shengfang Zhai, Qingni Shen +2AI Agent SecurityAutomated Red Teaming

  5. Beyond Maliciousness: Static and Runtime Attack-Surface Profiling of Agent Skills

    Oct 13, 2026Ratnesh Pandey, Japneet Singh, Harsh Akshit +2AI Agent SecurityAgent Skill Security Auditing

  6. Encrypted Skills Can Become New Security Exploits If AI Agents Know How to Decipher

    Oct 13, 2026Yan-Lun Chen, Pin-Yu Chen, Chia-Mu YuPrompt Injection Attacks on AI AgentsPrompt Injection Attacks

  7. SkillScreen: High-Recall Screening of Malicious Agent Skills with Decision Models

    Oct 13, 2026Jerrold Huang, Junwei Quan, Saiyue Lyu +2Agent Skill Security AuditingAI Agent Security Benchmarks

  8. Runaway Reaction: When Benign Skills Compose into Malicious Behavior

    Oct 5, 2026Zunlong Zhou, Ziyuan Yang, Mengyu Sun +1AI Agent SecurityLLM Agent Security

  9. Pretext: Defeating Malicious Skill Detection Frameworks for AI Agents

    Sep 30, 2026Tobias Kaiser, Aritra DharAI Agent SecurityAgent Skill Security Auditing

  10. Hiding in Plain Sight: Decoupling Pretext from Actuation for Skill Poisoning in LLM Agents

    Sep 30, 2026Wenxin Wu, Lingyong Yan, Lei Sha +2Adversarial Attacks on LLMsLLM Agent Security

  11. Can Agents Trust Their Skills? Uncovering Unsafe Chains of Trust in Skill-Based LLM Agents

    Sep 30, 2026Yan Wang, Zhihao Zhang, Ke Chen +5LLM Agent SecurityPrompt Injection Attacks on AI Agents

  12. SKILLLITE: Evidence-Guided Malicious Skill Auditing with Compact LLMs

    Sep 29, 2026Haoran Ou, Gelei Deng, Xuanye Zhang +3Small Language ModelsLLM Agent Security

  13. MMSkillRisk: Can Agents Stay Safe When Multimodal Skills Become Traps?

    Sep 28, 2026Lingqi Jiang, Jialuo Chen, Jianan Ma +8Prompt Injection Attacks on AI AgentsAgent Skill Security Auditing

  14. SkillDRE: Dual-Stage Red-Team Evolution of Agent Skills via Pre-Execution and Runtime Feedback

    Sep 26, 2026Pengyu Zhu, Jingyi Yang, Yi Liu +2Automated Red TeamingLLM Red Teaming

  15. Stealth Apart, Harm Together: Skill Cascading Attacks on Skill-Based Agent Systems

    Sep 24, 2026Zihao Zhu, Siwei Lyu, Adel Bibi +1Adversarial AttacksLLM Agent Security

  16. SkillAtlas: An Attack Trace Library for Agent Skills

    Sep 11, 2026Yuxin Tian, Zenghao Duan, Liang Pang +2LLM Agent SecurityAgent Skill Security Auditing

  17. AgentLeak: Cloning Stronger LLM Agent Capabilities onto Weaker Agents Beyond Skill Stealing

    Sep 7, 2026Xiaoting Lyu, Yuhong Wu, Yufei Han +6LLM Agent SecurityLLM Agent Skill Learning

  18. Safe Skill Retirement for Physical Agents

    Aug 25, 2026Zhonghao Zhan, Xiao Ma, Hamed HaddadiLLM Agent SafetyAgent Skill Security Auditing

  19. ClawSentry: A Progressive Multi-Tier Security Monitor for Safeguarding Autonomous LLM Agents

    Aug 21, 2026Kai Wang, Zeming Wei, BiaoJie Zeng +7AI Agent SecurityAI Agent Monitoring

  20. MaliciousSkillBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Malicious Agent Skill Detection

    Aug 20, 2026Yue Wang, Yi Liu, Gelei Deng +4AI Agent Security BenchmarksAgent Skill Security Auditing

  21. TRUSS: Towards Task-Reliable and User-Safe Automated Agent Skill Generation

    Aug 18, 2026Zhibo Zhang, Zhen Ouyang, Ling Shi +1Agent Skill Security AuditingTool Access Control for LLM Agents

  22. CompoSkill: Compositional Skill Chain Attacks from Individually Scanner-Passing LLM Agent Skills

    Aug 17, 2026Mingxiao Liu, Zhoumian Jiang, Jianan Ma +4AI Agent SecurityAgent Skill Security Auditing

  23. ColluSkill: Adversarial Cross-Skill Composition for Evading Agent Skill Scanners

    Aug 10, 2026Puyu Zeng, Simeng Qin, Jingzhi Li +3AI Agent SecurityLLM Agent Security

  24. SkillsMetric: Mapping the Detection Boundary of Static Analysis for Malicious Agent Skills

    Aug 9, 2026Xinze Chen, Chi Zhang, Ping Ji +1Static Code AnalysisAI Agent Security Benchmarks

  25. SkillConsist: Detecting Inconsistencies in Agent Skills via Bidirectional Graph Alignment

    Aug 7, 2026Chaofan Meng, Yuhang Zheng, Yingnan Zhou +1Agent EvaluationAgent Skill Security Auditing

  26. SkillTrace: Multi-Trace Provenance Auditing for LLM-Agent Skill Reuse

    Aug 5, 2026Jialuo Chen, Minghe Wang, Lingqi Jiang +7Data ProvenanceAI Agent Auditing

  27. When Agents Learn to Be You: Benchmarking Privacy Leakage, Impersonation Risk, and Defenses in Persona Skills

    Aug 4, 2026Yongli Xiang, Zhifang Zhang, Bojun Yang +4Privacy Leakage in Language ModelsAI Agent Security Benchmarks