Semantic manipulations of SKILL.md descriptions enable effective supply-chain attacks that bias AI agent skill registries toward adversarial skills in discovery, selection, and governance.
citation dossier
Schmotz, L
16Pith papers citing it
17reference links
cs.CRtop field · 13 papers
UNVERDICTEDtop verdict bucket · 15 papers
why this work matters in Pith
Pith has found this work in 16 reviewed papers. Its strongest current cluster is cs.CR (13 papers). The largest review-status bucket among citing papers is UNVERDICTED (15 papers). For highly cited works, this page shows a dossier first and a bounded explorer second; it never tries to render every citing paper at once.
years
2026 16representative citing papers
DDIPE poisons LLM agent skills by embedding malicious logic in documentation examples, achieving 11.6-33.5% bypass rates across frameworks while explicit attacks are blocked, with 2.5% evading detection.
Agent Skills has structural security weaknesses from missing data-instruction boundaries, single-approval persistent trust, and absent marketplace reviews that require fundamental redesign.
The TAB benchmark reveals that frontier terminal agents achieve high task completion but low selective alignment with relevant environmental cues over distractors, and prompt-injection defenses block both.
Malicious Skills induce coding agents to hallucinate and import attacker-controlled packages at high rates while evading detection.
SIGIL cryptographically seals the audit-runtime gap for LLM skills via an on-chain registry with four publication types, DAO vetting, and a runtime verification loader that enforces integrity and permissions.
ManyIH and ManyIH-Bench address instruction conflicts in LLM agents with up to 12 privilege levels across 853 tasks, revealing frontier models achieve only ~40% accuracy.
SkillSafetyBench shows that localized non-user attacks via skills and artifacts can consistently induce unsafe agent behavior across domains and model backends, independent of user intent.
BIV audits AI agent skills at scale, finding 80% deviate from declared behavior on 49,943 skills and achieving 0.946 F1 for malicious skill detection.
DeepTrap automates discovery of contextual vulnerabilities in OpenClaw agents via trajectory optimization, showing that unsafe behavior can be induced while preserving task completion and that final-response checks are insufficient.
Multi-agent LLM frameworks can spread compromises across agent boundaries via insecure memory inheritance during subagent spawning.
SkillScope detects over-privileged LLM agent skills with 94.53% F1 score via graph analysis and replay validation, finding 7,039 problematic skills in the wild and reducing violations by 88.56% while preserving task completion.
ARGUS defends LLM agents from context-aware prompt injections by tracking information provenance and verifying decisions against trustworthy evidence, reducing attack success to 3.8% while retaining 87.5% task utility.
RouteGuard uses response-conditioned attention and hidden-state alignment to detect skill poisoning in LLM agents, achieving 0.8834 F1 on Skill-Inject benchmarks and recovering 90.51% of attacks missed by lexical screening.
ClawGuard enforces deterministic, user-derived access constraints at tool boundaries to block indirect prompt injection without changing the underlying LLM.
SkillGuard-Robust formulates pre-load auditing of untrusted Agent Skills as a three-way classification task and achieves 97.30% exact match and 98.33% malicious-risk recall on held-out benchmarks.
citing papers explorer
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Under the Hood of SKILL.md: Semantic Supply-chain Attacks on AI Agent Skill Registry
Semantic manipulations of SKILL.md descriptions enable effective supply-chain attacks that bias AI agent skill registries toward adversarial skills in discovery, selection, and governance.
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Supply-Chain Poisoning Attacks Against LLM Coding Agent Skill Ecosystems
DDIPE poisons LLM agent skills by embedding malicious logic in documentation examples, achieving 11.6-33.5% bypass rates across frameworks while explicit attacks are blocked, with 2.5% evading detection.
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Towards Secure Agent Skills: Architecture, Threat Taxonomy, and Security Analysis
Agent Skills has structural security weaknesses from missing data-instruction boundaries, single-approval persistent trust, and absent marketplace reviews that require fundamental redesign.
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No More, No Less: Task Alignment in Terminal Agents
The TAB benchmark reveals that frontier terminal agents achieve high task completion but low selective alignment with relevant environmental cues over distractors, and prompt-injection defenses block both.
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Trust Me, Import This: Dependency Steering Attacks via Malicious Agent Skills
Malicious Skills induce coding agents to hallucinate and import attacker-controlled packages at high rates while evading detection.
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Sealing the Audit-Runtime Gap for LLM Skills
SIGIL cryptographically seals the audit-runtime gap for LLM skills via an on-chain registry with four publication types, DAO vetting, and a runtime verification loader that enforces integrity and permissions.
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Many-Tier Instruction Hierarchy in LLM Agents
ManyIH and ManyIH-Bench address instruction conflicts in LLM agents with up to 12 privilege levels across 853 tasks, revealing frontier models achieve only ~40% accuracy.
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SkillSafetyBench: Evaluating Agent Safety under Skill-Facing Attack Surfaces
SkillSafetyBench shows that localized non-user attacks via skills and artifacts can consistently induce unsafe agent behavior across domains and model backends, independent of user intent.
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Behavioral Integrity Verification for AI Agent Skills
BIV audits AI agent skills at scale, finding 80% deviate from declared behavior on 49,943 skills and achieving 0.946 F1 for malicious skill detection.
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Red-Teaming Agent Execution Contexts: Open-World Security Evaluation on OpenClaw
DeepTrap automates discovery of contextual vulnerabilities in OpenClaw agents via trajectory optimization, showing that unsafe behavior can be induced while preserving task completion and that final-response checks are insufficient.
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When Child Inherits: Modeling and Exploiting Subagent Spawn in Multi-Agent Networks
Multi-agent LLM frameworks can spread compromises across agent boundaries via insecure memory inheritance during subagent spawning.
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SkillScope: Toward Fine-Grained Least-Privilege Enforcement for Agent Skills
SkillScope detects over-privileged LLM agent skills with 94.53% F1 score via graph analysis and replay validation, finding 7,039 problematic skills in the wild and reducing violations by 88.56% while preserving task completion.
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ARGUS: Defending LLM Agents Against Context-Aware Prompt Injection
ARGUS defends LLM agents from context-aware prompt injections by tracking information provenance and verifying decisions against trustworthy evidence, reducing attack success to 3.8% while retaining 87.5% task utility.
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RouteGuard: Internal-Signal Detection of Skill Poisoning in LLM Agents
RouteGuard uses response-conditioned attention and hidden-state alignment to detect skill poisoning in LLM agents, achieving 0.8834 F1 on Skill-Inject benchmarks and recovering 90.51% of attacks missed by lexical screening.
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ClawGuard: A Runtime Security Framework for Tool-Augmented LLM Agents Against Indirect Prompt Injection
ClawGuard enforces deterministic, user-derived access constraints at tool boundaries to block indirect prompt injection without changing the underlying LLM.
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Structured Security Auditing and Robustness Enhancement for Untrusted Agent Skills
SkillGuard-Robust formulates pre-load auditing of untrusted Agent Skills as a three-way classification task and achieves 97.30% exact match and 98.33% malicious-risk recall on held-out benchmarks.