MalSkills: Detecting Malicious Skills in the Agentic Supply Chain via Neuro-symbolic Reasoning

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 attack surface for malicious skills. Detecting malicious skills is challenging because relevant evidence is often distributed across heterogeneous artifacts and must be reasoned in context. Existing static, LLM-based, and dynamic approaches each capture only part of this problem, making them insufficient for robust real-world detection. In this paper, we present MalSkills, a neuro-symbolic framework for malicious skills detection. MalSkills first extracts security-sensitive operations from heterogeneous artifacts through a combination of symbolic parsing and LLM-assisted semantic analysis. It then constructs the skill dependency graph that links artifacts, operations, operands, and value flows across the skill. On top of this graph, MalSkills performs neuro-symbolic reasoning to infer malicious patterns or previously unseen suspicious workflows. We evaluate MalSkills on a benchmark of 200 real-world skills against 5 state-of-the-art baselines. MalSkills achieves 93% F1, outperforming the baselines by 5--87 percentage points. We further apply MalSkills to analyze 150,108 skills collected from 7 public registries, flagging 620 potentially malicious skills. Through manual review, we confirm that 400 of them are indeed malicious, all of which were responsibly reported and are currently awaiting confirmation from the platforms and maintainers. These results demonstrate the practical potential of MalSkills in securing the agentic supply chain.