English

SkillScope: Toward Fine-Grained Least-Privilege Enforcement for Agent Skills

Cryptography and Security 2026-05-08 v1

Abstract

Agent Skills have become a practical way to extend LLM agents by packaging metadata, natural-language instructions, and executable resources into reusable capability bundles. However, this growing Skill ecosystem introduces a new compliance risk: a Skill may perform high-impact actions that exceed the minimum necessary scope of the user's current task, thereby violating least-privilege. Existing skill detection approaches are insufficient for this problem because it is inherently task-conditioned: the same action may be necessary under one user prompt but over-privileged under another. In this paper, we present SkillScope, a framework for fine-grained least-privilege enforcement in Agent Skills. SkillScope adopts a graph-based analysis approach that models instruction-level procedures and code-level operations as fine-grained action nodes. It extracts potential over-privilege candidates, validates them under graph-instantiated user tasks through replay-based analysis, and constrains validated over-privileged actions via control-flow privilege constraining. We evaluate SkillScope through effectiveness experiments and large-scale real-world measurement. SkillScope achieves 94.53% F1 for skill over-privilege detection. In the wild, SkillScope validates 7,039 Skills with over-privileged behaviors, showing that least-privilege violations are prevalent in current Skill ecosystems. In the privilege-constraining evaluation, SkillScope reduces triggered over-privileged action-in-task instances by 88.56% while preserving legitimate task completion.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.05868,
  title  = {SkillScope: Toward Fine-Grained Least-Privilege Enforcement for Agent Skills},
  author = {Jiangrong Wu and Yuhong Nan and Yixi Lin and Huaijin Wang and Yuming Xiao and Shuai Wang and Zibin Zheng},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.05868},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

19 pages, 7 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T12:54:23.996Z