mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Structured Security Auditing and Robustness Enhancement for Untrusted Agent Skills

arXiv 2604.25109 ↗First posted 28 Apr 2026cs.CR cs.AIcited by 7

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Abstract (arXiv)

Agent Skills package SKILL.md files, scripts, reference documents, and repository context into reusable capability units, turning pre-load auditing from single-prompt filtering into cross-file security review. Existing guardrails often flag risk but recover malicious intent inconsistently under semantics-preserving rewrites. This paper formulates pre-load auditing for untrusted Agent Skills as a robust three-way classification task and introduces SkillGuard-Robust, which combines role-aware evidence extraction, selective semantic verification, and consistency-preserving adjudication. We evaluate SkillGuard-Robust on SkillGuardBench and two public-ecosystem extensions through five large evaluation views ranging from 254 to 404 packages. On the 404-package held-out aggregate, SkillGuard-Robust reaches 97.30% overall exact match, 98.33% malicious-risk recall, and 98.89% attack exact consistency. On the 254-package external-ecosystem view, it reaches 99.66%, 100.00%, and 100.00%, respectively. These results support a bounded conclusion: factorized package auditing materially improves frozen and public-ecosystem robustness, while harsher external-source transfer remains an open challenge.

Key facts. Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 22 of its 32 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 28 Apr 2026.

Builds on

22 of 32 references.

References · 22

  1. 2023Llama Guard: LLM-based Input-Output Safeguard for Human-AI Conversationscited by 1,207
  2. 2024The Instruction Hierarchy: Training LLMs to Prioritize Privileged Instructionscited by 493
  3. 2023Benchmarking and Defending Against Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks on Large Language Modelscited by 264
  4. 2024SecAlign: Defending Against Prompt Injection with Preference Optimizationcited by 210
  5. 2025Adaptive Attacks Break Defenses Against Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks on LLM Agentscited by 125
  6. 2025PromptArmor: Simple yet Effective Prompt Injection Defensescited by 108
  7. 2026Agent Skills in the Wild: An Empirical Study of Security Vulnerabilities at Scalecited by 105
  8. 2026Skill-Inject: Measuring Agent Vulnerability to Skill File Attackscited by 90
  9. 2025IPIGuard: A Novel Tool Dependency Graph-Based Defense Against Indirect Prompt Injection in LLM Agentscited by 54
  10. 2025IHEval: Evaluating Language Models on Following the Instruction Hierarchycited by 53
  11. 2026"Do Not Mention This to the User": Detecting and Understanding Malicious Agent Skills in the Wildcited by 50
  12. 2024InjecGuard: Benchmarking and Mitigating Over-defense in Prompt Injection Guardrail Modelscited by 42
10 more
  1. 2025Agent Skills Enable a New Class of Realistic and Trivially Simple Prompt Injectionscited by 33
  2. 2025ThinkGuard: Deliberative Slow Thinking Leads to Cautious Guardrailscited by 31
  3. 2026AgentSentry: Mitigating Indirect Prompt Injection in LLM Agents via Temporal Causal Diagnostics and Context Purificationcited by 29
  4. 2024"Not Aligned" is Not "Malicious": Being Careful about Hallucinations of Large Language Models' Jailbreakcited by 25
  5. 2024Breaking ReAct Agents: Foot-in-the-Door Attack Will Get You Incited by 22
  6. 2024RoleBreak: Character Hallucination as a Jailbreak Attack in Role-Playing Systemscited by 21
  7. 2025Safety Through Reasoning: An Empirical Study of Reasoning Guardrail Modelscited by 16
  8. 2024Stealthy Jailbreak Attacks on Large Language Models via Benign Data Mirroringcited by 12
  9. 2026Context Matters: Repository-Aware Security Analysis of the Agent Skill Ecosystemcited by 11
  10. 2026ReasAlign: Reasoning Enhanced Safety Alignment against Prompt Injection Attackcited by 4

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 7.

7 papers.

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  1. 2026SkillAtlas: An Attack Trace Library for Agent Skills
  2. 2026Benchmarking Security Risk Detection and Verification in Open Agentic Skill Ecosystems
  3. 2026Towards a Risk Assessment of Malicious Skill Files in Coding Agents
  4. 2026Behavioral Integrity Verification for AI Agent Skills
  5. 2026MaliciousSkillBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Malicious Agent Skill Detection
  6. 2026SkillProbe: Security Auditing for Emerging Agent Skill Marketplaces via Multi-Agent Collaboration
  7. 2026RedAct: Redacting Agent Capability Traces for Procedural Skill Protection
  8. 2026SKILLLITE: Evidence-Guided Malicious Skill Auditing with Compact LLMs