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Related papers: Malicious Agent Skills in the Wild: A Large-Scale …

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The rise of AI agent frameworks has introduced agent skills, modular packages containing instructions and executable code that dynamically extend agent capabilities. While this architecture enables powerful customization, skills execute…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Yi Liu , Weizhe Wang , Ruitao Feng , Yao Zhang , Guangquan Xu , Gelei Deng , Yuekang Li , Leo Zhang

We analyzed 3,984 AI agent skills from major marketplaces and found 76 confirmed malicious payloads, including credential theft, backdoor installation, and data exfiltration. 13.4% of all skills contain at least one critical-level security…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Luca Beurer-Kellner , Aleksei Kudrinskii , Marco Milanta , Kristian Bonde Nielsen , Hemang Sarkar , Liran Tal

Third-party skills extend LLM agents with powerful capabilities but often handle sensitive credentials in privileged environments, making leakage risks poorly understood. We present the first large-scale empirical study of this problem,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Zhihao Chen , Ying Zhang , Yi Liu , Gelei Deng , Yuekang Li , Yanjun Zhang , Jianting Ning , Leo Yu Zhang , Lei Ma , Zhiqiang Li

Agent skills extend local AI agents, such as Claude Code or Open Claw, with additional functionality, and their popularity has led to the emergence of dedicated skill marketplaces, similar to app stores for mobile applications.…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Florian Holzbauer , David Schmidt , Gabriel Gegenhuber , Sebastian Schrittwieser , Johanna Ullrich

Third-party skills are becoming the package ecosystem for LLM agents. They package natural-language instructions, helper scripts, templates, documents, and service configuration into reusable workflows. This makes skills useful, but it also…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Haomin Zhuang , Hanwen Xing , Yujun Zhou , Yuchen Ma , Yue Huang , Yili Shen , Yufei Han , Xiangliang Zhang

Agent Skills, structured packages of procedural knowledge loaded into an LLM agent at inference time, are widely reported to improve task pass rates by an average of 16.2~percentage points across diverse domains. Yet the same benchmarks…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Samuel Jacob Chacko , James Hugglestone , Chashi Mahiul Islam , Xiuwen Liu

Agent skills extend large language model (LLM) agents with reusable, program-like modules that define triggering conditions, procedural logic, and tool interactions. As these skills proliferate in public marketplaces, it is unclear what…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-02-10 George Ling , Shanshan Zhong , Richard Huang

Agent skills extend LLM agents with privileged third-party capabilities such as filesystem access, credentials, network calls, and shell execution. Existing safety work catches malicious prompts and risky runtime actions, but the skill…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Yuhao Wu , Tung-Ling Li , Hongliang Liu

Large language models (LLMs) have evolved into autonomous agents that rely on open skill ecosystems (e.g., ClawHub and Skills.Rest), hosting numerous publicly reusable skills. Existing security research on these ecosystems mainly focuses on…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Yukun Jiang , Yage Zhang , Michael Backes , Xinyue Shen , Yang Zhang

LLM agents are evolving rapidly, powered by code execution, tools, and the recently introduced agent skills feature. Skills allow users to extend LLM applications with specialized third-party code, knowledge, and instructions. Although this…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-02-26 David Schmotz , Luca Beurer-Kellner , Sahar Abdelnabi , Maksym Andriushchenko

Skills are increasingly used to extend LLM agents by packaging prompts, code, and configurations into reusable modules. As public registries and marketplaces expand, they form an emerging agentic supply chain, but also introduce a new…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Shenao Wang , Junjie He , Yanjie Zhao , Yayi Wang , Kan Yu , Haoyu Wang

Agent Skills is an emerging open standard that defines a modular, filesystem-based packaging format enabling LLM-based agents to acquire domain-specific expertise on demand. Despite rapid adoption across multiple agentic platforms and the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Zhiyuan Li , Jingzheng Wu , Xiang Ling , Xing Cui , Tianyue Luo

LLM-based coding agents extend their capabilities via third-party agent skills distributed through open marketplaces without mandatory security review. Unlike traditional packages, these skills are executed as operational directives with…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Yubin Qu , Yi Liu , Tongcheng Geng , Gelei Deng , Yuekang Li , Leo Yu Zhang , Ying Zhang , Lei Ma

Multi-agent systems coordinate LLM-based agents to perform tasks on users' behalf. In real-world applications, multi-agent systems will inevitably interact with untrusted inputs, such as malicious Web content, files, email attachments, and…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Harold Triedman , Rishi Jha , Vitaly Shmatikov

Personal AI agents like OpenClaw run with elevated privileges on users' local machines, where a single successful prompt injection can leak credentials, redirect financial transactions, or destroy files. This threat goes well beyond…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Bowen Wei , Yunbei Zhang , Jinhao Pan , Kai Mei , Xiao Wang , Jihun Hamm , Ziwei Zhu , Yingqiang Ge

Autonomous AI agents increasingly extend their capabilities through Agent Skills: modular filesystem packages whose SKILL.md files describe when and how agents should use them. While this design enables scalable, on-demand capability…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Shoumik Saha , Kazem Faghih , Soheil Feizi

Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on skills to package reusable capabilities through instructions, tools, and resources. High-quality skills embed expert knowledge, curated workflows, and execution constraints into agents,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Zihan Wang , Rui Zhang , Yu Liu , Chi Liu , Qingchuan Zhao , Hongwei Li , Guowen Xu

Skill ecosystems have emerged as an increasingly important layer in Large Language Model (LLM) agent systems, enabling reusable task packaging, public distribution, and community-driven capability sharing. However, despite their rapid…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Haichuan Hu , Ye Shang , Quanjun Zhang

The dark patterns, deceptive interface designs manipulating user behaviors, have been extensively studied for their effects on human decision-making and autonomy. Yet, with the rising prominence of LLM-powered GUI agents that automate tasks…

The rapid proliferation of agentic AI skill ecosystems -- exemplified by OpenClaw (228,000 GitHub stars) and Anthropic Agent Skills (75,600 stars) -- has introduced a critical supply chain attack surface. The ClawHavoc campaign…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Varun Pratap Bhardwaj
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