mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

SkillSafetyBench: Evaluating Agent Safety under Skill-Facing Attack Surfaces

arXiv 2605.12015 ↗First posted 12 May 2026cs.CR cs.AI cs.CLcited by 15

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent threats, guardrails and governance

Abstract (arXiv)

Reusable skills are becoming a common interface for extending large language model agents, packaging procedural guidance with access to files, tools, memory, and execution environments. However, this modularity introduces attack surfaces that are largely missed by existing safety evaluations: even when the user request is benign, unsafe influence may reside in skill guidance, local artifacts, or execution-environment files that steer the agent toward unsafe actions. We present SkillSafetyBench, a runnable benchmark for evaluating such skill-facing safety failures. SkillSafetyBench includes 155 adversarial cases across 47 tasks, 6 risk domains, and 30 safety categories, each evaluated with a case-specific rule-based verifier. Experiments with multiple CLI agents and model backends show that non-user attacks can consistently induce unsafe behavior, with distinct failure patterns across domains, attack methods, and scaffold-model pairings. Our findings suggest that agent safety depends not only on model-level alignment, but also on how agents interpret skills, trust workflow context, and act through executable environments. The complete benchmark is available at https://github.com/AI45Lab/skill-safety-bench.

Key facts. Cited by 15 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 36 of its 70 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 12 May 2026.

Builds on

36 of 70 references.

Closest ancestors · 9

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026SkillTrojan: Backdoor Attacks on Skill-Based Agent Systems8 Apr
  2. 2026SkillAttack: Automated Red Teaming of Agent Skills through Attack Path Refinement5 Apr
  3. 2026Skill-Inject: Measuring Agent Vulnerability to Skill File Attacks23 Feb
  4. 2026Agent Skills in the Wild: An Empirical Study of Security Vulnerabilities at Scale15 Jan
  5. 2025SEC-bench: Automated Benchmarking of LLM Agents on Real-World Software Security Tasks13 Jun
  6. 2025WASP: Benchmarking Web Agent Security Against Prompt Injection Attacks22 Apr
  7. 2024AgentHarm: A Benchmark for Measuring Harmfulness of LLM Agents11 Oct
  8. 2024AgentPoison: Red-teaming LLM Agents via Poisoning Memory or Knowledge Bases17 Jul
  9. 2023Identifying the Risks of LM Agents with an LM-Emulated Sandbox25 Sep

Other references · 27

  1. 2023Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arenacited by 8,393
  2. 2023SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?cited by 3,193
  3. 2023G-Eval: NLG Evaluation using GPT-4 with Better Human Alignmentcited by 2,205
  4. 2023WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agentscited by 1,908
  5. 2024LiveCodeBench: Holistic and Contamination Free Evaluation of Large Language Models for Codecited by 1,906
  6. 2023ToolLLM: Facilitating Large Language Models to Master 16000+ Real-world APIscited by 1,880
  7. 2023Not what you've signed up for: Compromising Real-World LLM-Integrated Applications with Indirect Prompt Injectioncited by 1,339
  8. 2024τ-bench: A Benchmark for Tool-Agent-User Interaction in Real-World Domainscited by 1,280
  9. 2024OSWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Open-Ended Tasks in Real Computer Environmentscited by 1,134
  10. 2023Prompt Injection attack against LLM-integrated Applicationscited by 568
  11. 2026GLM-5: from Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineeringcited by 502
  12. 2024MLE-bench: Evaluating Machine Learning Agents on Machine Learning Engineeringcited by 429
15 more
  1. 2024AppWorld: A Controllable World of Apps and People for Benchmarking Interactive Coding Agentscited by 359
  2. 2024StruQ: Defending Against Prompt Injection with Structured Queriescited by 325
  3. 2024TheAgentCompany: Benchmarking LLM Agents on Consequential Real World Taskscited by 306
  4. 2026SkillsBench: Benchmarking How Well Agent Skills Work Across Diverse Taskscited by 289
  5. 2024ToolSandbox: A Stateful, Conversational, Interactive Evaluation Benchmark for LLM Tool Use Capabilitiescited by 272
  6. 2023Benchmarking and Defending Against Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks on Large Language Modelscited by 237
  7. 2025SkillWeaver: Web Agents can Self-Improve by Discovering and Honing Skillscited by 174
  8. 2023TaskBench: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Task Automationcited by 138
  9. 2026SoK: Agentic Skills -- Beyond Tool Use in LLM Agentscited by 120
  10. 2025Inducing Programmatic Skills for Agentic Taskscited by 103
  11. 2024GTA: A Benchmark for General Tool Agentscited by 77
  12. 2026SkillX: Automatically Constructing Skill Knowledge Bases for Agentscited by 69
  13. 2026Agent Skills: A Data-Driven Analysis of Claude Skills for Extending Large Language Model Functionalitycited by 66
  14. 2025ALE-Bench: A Benchmark for Long-Horizon Objective-Driven Algorithm Engineeringcited by 30
  15. 2026BadSkill: Backdoor Attacks on Agent Skills via Model-in-Skill Poisoningcited by 25

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 15.

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  1. 2026When Safe Skills Collide: Measuring Compositional Risk in Agent Skill Ecosystems
  2. 2026SkillAtlas: An Attack Trace Library for Agent Skills
  3. 2026OpenSkillRisk: Benchmarking Agent Safety When Using Real-World Risky Third-Party Skills
  4. 2026SkillSecurer: Detecting and Patching Prompt-Injection Vulnerabilities in AI Agent Skills
  5. 2026SafeClawBench: Separating Semantic, Audit-Evidence, and Sandbox Harm in Tool-Using LLM Agents
  6. 2026Agent Skill Security: Threat Models, Attacks, Defenses, and Evaluation
  7. 2026BLINDSPOT: A Benchmark for Safety and Refusal Calibration in Long-Horizon Tool-Using Agents
  8. 2025OpenAgentSafety: A Comprehensive Framework for Evaluating Real-World AI Agent Safety