SkillProbe: Security Auditing for Emerging Agent Skill Marketplaces via Multi-Agent Collaboration
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent threats, guardrails and governance
Abstract (arXiv)
With the rapid evolution of Large Language Model (LLM) agent ecosystems, centralized skill marketplaces have emerged as pivotal infrastructure for augmenting agent capabilities. However, these marketplaces face unprecedented security challenges, primarily stemming from semantic-behavioral inconsistency and inter-skill combinatorial risks, where individually benign skills induce malicious behaviors during collaborative invocation. To address these vulnerabilities, we propose SkillProbe, a multi-stage security auditing framework driven by multi-agent collaboration. SkillProbe introduces a "Skills-for-Skills" design paradigm, encapsulating auditing processes into standardized skill modules to drive specialized agents through a rigorous pipeline, including admission filtering, semantic-behavioral alignment detection, and combinatorial risk simulation. We conducted a large-scale evaluation using 8 mainstream LLM series across 2,500 real-world skills from ClawHub. Our results reveal a striking popularity-security paradox, where download volume is not a reliable proxy for security quality, as over 90% of high-popularity skills failed to pass rigorous auditing. Crucially, we discovered that high-risk skills form a single giant connected component within the risk-link dimension, demonstrating that cascaded risks are systemic rather than isolated occurrences. We hope that SkillProbe will inspire researchers to provide a scalable governance infrastructure for constructing a trustworthy Agentic Web. SkillProbe is accessible for public experience at skillhub.holosai.io.
Key facts. Cited by 21 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 17 of its 32 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 22 Mar 2026.
Builds on
17 of 32 references.
Closest ancestors · 6
Same direction, newest first
- 2026Skill-Inject: Measuring Agent Vulnerability to Skill File Attacks23 Feb
- 2026"Do Not Mention This to the User": Detecting and Understanding Malicious Agent Skills in the Wild6 Feb
- 2026Don't believe everything you read: Understanding and Measuring MCP Behavior under Misleading Tool Descriptions3 Feb
- 2026Agent Skills in the Wild: An Empirical Study of Security Vulnerabilities at Scale15 Jan
- 2025Multi-Agent Systems Execute Arbitrary Malicious Code15 Mar
- 2024InjecAgent: Benchmarking Indirect Prompt Injections in Tool-Integrated Large Language Model Agents5 Mar
Other references · 11
- 2023AutoGen: Enabling Next-Gen LLM Applications via Multi-Agent Conversationcited by 1,906
- 2023MetaGPT: Meta Programming for A Multi-Agent Collaborative Frameworkcited by 1,761
- 2023Not what you've signed up for: Compromising Real-World LLM-Integrated Applications with Indirect Prompt Injectioncited by 1,339
- 2023Benchmarking and Defending Against Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks on Large Language Modelscited by 237
- 2024Defending Against Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks With Spotlightingcited by 233
- 2026SoK: Agentic Skills -- Beyond Tool Use in LLM Agentscited by 120
- 2020Deep Just-In-Time Inconsistency Detection Between Comments and Source Codecited by 20
- 2025Everything You Wanted to Know About LLM-based Vulnerability Detection But Were Afraid to Askcited by 15
- 2025A Survey on Inference Engines for Large Language Models: Perspectives on Optimization and Efficiencycited by 12
- 2024You Can REST Now: Automated REST API Documentation and Testing via LLM-Assisted Request Mutationscited by 2
- 2025DocPrism: Multi-lingual Detection of Incorrectness Inconsistencies between Code and Documentationcited by 2
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 21.
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- 2026Externalization in LLM Agents: A Unified Review of Memory, Skills, Protocols and Harness Engineeringcited by 68
- 2026SkillSieve: A Hierarchical Triage Framework for Detecting Malicious AI Agent Skillscited by 18
- 2026Skills on the Fly: Test-Time Adaptive Skill Synthesis for LLM Agentscited by 10
- 2026HarmfulSkillBench: How Do Harmful Skills Weaponize Your Agents?cited by 9
- 2026Benign in Isolation, Harmful in Composition: Security Risks in Agent Skill Ecosystemscited by 9
- 2026VIGIL: Runtime Enforcement of Behavioral Specifications in AI Agent Skillscited by 8
- 2026MalSkills: Detecting Malicious Skills in the Agentic Supply Chain via Neuro-symbolic Reasoningcited by 5
- 2026No Attack Required: Semantic Fuzzing for Specification Violations in Agent Skillscited by 5
- 2026Seeing Is Not Screening: Multimodal Hidden Instruction Attacks on Agent Skill Scannerscited by 5
- 2026From Anatomy to Smells: An Empirical Study of SKILL.md in Agent Skillscited by 5
- 2026Trust Me, Import This: Dependency Steering Attacks via Malicious Agent Skillscited by 4
- 2026Agent Skill Security: Threat Models, Attacks, Defenses, and Evaluationcited by 4
9 more
- 2026SkillMAS: Skill Co-Evolution with LLM-based Multi-Agent Systemcited by 3
- 2026Responsible Agentic AI Requires Explicit Provenancecited by 3
- 2026Red-Teaming Agent Execution Contexts: Open-World Security Evaluation on OpenClawcited by 2
- 2026Proteus: A Self-Evolving Red Team for Agent Skill Ecosystemscited by 2
- 2026Position: Academic Conferences are Potentially Facing Denominator Gaming Caused by Fully Automated Scientific Agentscited by 1
- 2026SkillFuzz: Fuzzing Skill Composition for Implicit Intents Discovery in Open Skill Marketplacescited by 1
- 2026Harness Engineering: Anatomy, Architecture, and Evolution of Coding Agents -- A Source-Code Study of Eleven Systemscited by 1
- 2026Towards a Systems Foundation for Agentic Skills: Architecture, Lifecycle, and Securitycited by 0
- 2026Stealth Apart, Harm Together: Skill Cascading Attacks on Skill-Based Agent Systemscited by 0
- 2026Stealth Apart, Harm Together: Skill Cascading Attacks on Skill-Based Agent Systems24 Sep 2026
- 2026Towards a Systems Foundation for Agentic Skills: Architecture, Lifecycle, and Security30 Aug 2026
- 2026Harness Engineering: Anatomy, Architecture, and Evolution of Coding Agents -- A Source-Code Study of Eleven Systems15 Jul 2026
- 2026Agent Skill Security: Threat Models, Attacks, Defenses, and Evaluation15 Jul 2026
- 2026SkillFuzz: Fuzzing Skill Composition for Implicit Intents Discovery in Open Skill Marketplaces2 Jul 2026
- 2026From Anatomy to Smells: An Empirical Study of SKILL.md in Agent Skills1 Jul 2026
- 2026VIGIL: Runtime Enforcement of Behavioral Specifications in AI Agent Skills25 Jun 2026
- 2026Seeing Is Not Screening: Multimodal Hidden Instruction Attacks on Agent Skill Scanners16 Jun 2026
- 2026Benign in Isolation, Harmful in Composition: Security Risks in Agent Skill Ecosystems13 Jun 2026
- 2026Responsible Agentic AI Requires Explicit Provenance16 May 2026
- 2026Skills on the Fly: Test-Time Adaptive Skill Synthesis for LLM Agents16 May 2026
- 2026No Attack Required: Semantic Fuzzing for Specification Violations in Agent Skills13 May 2026
9 more
- 2026Proteus: A Self-Evolving Red Team for Agent Skill Ecosystems12 May 2026
- 2026Red-Teaming Agent Execution Contexts: Open-World Security Evaluation on OpenClaw11 May 2026
- 2026Position: Academic Conferences are Potentially Facing Denominator Gaming Caused by Fully Automated Scientific Agents11 May 2026
- 2026Trust Me, Import This: Dependency Steering Attacks via Malicious Agent Skills10 May 2026
- 2026SkillMAS: Skill Co-Evolution with LLM-based Multi-Agent System10 May 2026
- 2026HarmfulSkillBench: How Do Harmful Skills Weaponize Your Agents?16 Apr 2026
- 2026Externalization in LLM Agents: A Unified Review of Memory, Skills, Protocols and Harness Engineering9 Apr 2026
- 2026SkillSieve: A Hierarchical Triage Framework for Detecting Malicious AI Agent Skills8 Apr 2026
- 2026MalSkills: Detecting Malicious Skills in the Agentic Supply Chain via Neuro-symbolic Reasoning28 Mar 2026
- 2026Externalization in LLM Agents: A Unified Review of Memory, Skills, Protocols and Harness Engineeringcited by 68
- 2026SkillSieve: A Hierarchical Triage Framework for Detecting Malicious AI Agent Skillscited by 18
- 2026HarmfulSkillBench: How Do Harmful Skills Weaponize Your Agents?cited by 9
- 2026Benign in Isolation, Harmful in Composition: Security Risks in Agent Skill Ecosystemscited by 9
- 2026VIGIL: Runtime Enforcement of Behavioral Specifications in AI Agent Skillscited by 8
- 2026No Attack Required: Semantic Fuzzing for Specification Violations in Agent Skillscited by 5
- 2026Seeing Is Not Screening: Multimodal Hidden Instruction Attacks on Agent Skill Scannerscited by 5
- 2026From Anatomy to Smells: An Empirical Study of SKILL.md in Agent Skillscited by 5
- 2026Trust Me, Import This: Dependency Steering Attacks via Malicious Agent Skillscited by 4
- 2026Agent Skill Security: Threat Models, Attacks, Defenses, and Evaluationcited by 4
- 2026SkillMAS: Skill Co-Evolution with LLM-based Multi-Agent Systemcited by 3
- 2026Responsible Agentic AI Requires Explicit Provenancecited by 3
12 most cited of 17 All 17 (JSON)
- 2026Stealth Apart, Harm Together: Skill Cascading Attacks on Skill-Based Agent Systems24 Sep 2026
- 2026Towards a Systems Foundation for Agentic Skills: Architecture, Lifecycle, and Security30 Aug 2026
- 2026Harness Engineering: Anatomy, Architecture, and Evolution of Coding Agents -- A Source-Code Study of Eleven Systems15 Jul 2026
- 2026Agent Skill Security: Threat Models, Attacks, Defenses, and Evaluation15 Jul 2026
- 2026From Anatomy to Smells: An Empirical Study of SKILL.md in Agent Skills1 Jul 2026
- 2026VIGIL: Runtime Enforcement of Behavioral Specifications in AI Agent Skills25 Jun 2026
- 2026Seeing Is Not Screening: Multimodal Hidden Instruction Attacks on Agent Skill Scanners16 Jun 2026
- 2026Benign in Isolation, Harmful in Composition: Security Risks in Agent Skill Ecosystems13 Jun 2026
- 2026Responsible Agentic AI Requires Explicit Provenance16 May 2026
- 2026No Attack Required: Semantic Fuzzing for Specification Violations in Agent Skills13 May 2026
- 2026Proteus: A Self-Evolving Red Team for Agent Skill Ecosystems12 May 2026
- 2026Red-Teaming Agent Execution Contexts: Open-World Security Evaluation on OpenClaw11 May 2026
12 newest of 17 All 17 (JSON)
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026Can Agents Trust Their Skills? Uncovering Unsafe Chains of Trust in Skill-Based LLM Agents
- 2026When Safe Skills Collide: Measuring Compositional Risk in Agent Skill Ecosystems
- 2026Towards Secure Agent Skills: Architecture, Threat Taxonomy, and Security Analysis
- 2026SKILLLITE: Evidence-Guided Malicious Skill Auditing with Compact LLMs
- 2026Black-Box Skill Stealing Attack from Proprietary LLM Agents: An Empirical Study
- 2026Demystifying Agent Skills for Smart Contract Auditing: Design, Effectiveness, Behavioral Impact
- 2026Benchmarking Security Risk Detection and Verification in Open Agentic Skill Ecosystems
- 2026Agent Skills: A Data-Driven Analysis of Claude Skills for Extending Large Language Model Functionality