When Skills Lie: Hidden-Comment Injection in LLM Agents
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent threats, guardrails and governance
Abstract (arXiv)
LLM agents often rely on Skills to describe available tools and recommended procedures. We study a hidden-comment prompt injection risk in this documentation layer: when a Markdown Skill is rendered to HTML, HTML comment blocks can become invisible to human reviewers, yet the raw text may still be supplied verbatim to the model. In experiments, we find that DeepSeek-V3.2 and GLM-4.5-Air can be influenced by malicious instructions embedded in a hidden comment appended to an otherwise legitimate Skill, yielding outputs that contain sensitive tool intentions. A short defensive system prompt that treats Skills as untrusted and forbids sensitive actions prevents these malicious tool calls and instead surfaces the suspicious hidden instructions.
Key facts. Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Agent threats, guardrails and governance, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 5 of its 6 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 11 Feb 2026.
Builds on
5 of 6 references.
Closest ancestors · 1
Same direction, newest first
Other references · 4
- 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,355
- 2022Ignore Previous Prompt: Attack Techniques For Language Modelscited by 760
- 2023A Survey on Large Language Model (LLM) Security and Privacy: The Good, the Bad, and the Uglycited by 380
- 2025We Urgently Need Privilege Management in MCP: A Measurement of API Usage in MCP Ecosystemscited by 15
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 5.
5 papers.
- 2026Externalization in LLM Agents: A Unified Review of Memory, Skills, Protocols and Harness Engineeringcited by 68
- 2026SkillHarness: Harnessing Safe Skills for Computer-Use Agentscited by 2
- 2026CrackedPDFs: A Controlled Benchmark for Hidden Prompt Injection in PDFscited by 0
- 2026Towards a Systems Foundation for Agentic Skills: Architecture, Lifecycle, and Securitycited by 0
- 2026ECLIPSE: Self-Evolving Stealthy Prompt Injection Attack against Long-Horizon Agentic Systemscited by 0
- 2026ECLIPSE: Self-Evolving Stealthy Prompt Injection Attack against Long-Horizon Agentic Systems31 Aug 2026
- 2026Towards a Systems Foundation for Agentic Skills: Architecture, Lifecycle, and Security30 Aug 2026
- 2026CrackedPDFs: A Controlled Benchmark for Hidden Prompt Injection in PDFs3 Jul 2026
- 2026SkillHarness: Harnessing Safe Skills for Computer-Use Agents2 Jun 2026
- 2026Externalization in LLM Agents: A Unified Review of Memory, Skills, Protocols and Harness Engineering9 Apr 2026
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026Skill-Inject: Measuring Agent Vulnerability to Skill File Attacks
- 2026Behavioral Skill Reconstruction: Reconstructing Hidden Functionality from LLM Agent Skills
- 2025Agent Skills Enable a New Class of Realistic and Trivially Simple Prompt Injections
- 2026SkillMutator: Benchmarking and Defending Language-and-Code Cross-modal Attacks on LLM Agent Skills
- 2026RouteGuard: Internal-Signal Detection of Skill Poisoning in LLM Agents
- 2026"Do Not Mention This to the User": Detecting and Understanding Malicious Agent Skills in the Wild
- 2026Black-Box Skill Stealing Attack from Proprietary LLM Agents: An Empirical Study
- 2026Seeing Is Not Screening: Multimodal Hidden Instruction Attacks on Agent Skill Scanners