SkillSafetyBench: Evaluating Agent Safety under Skill-Facing Attack Surfaces
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
- 2026SkillTrojan: Backdoor Attacks on Skill-Based Agent Systems8 Apr
- 2026SkillAttack: Automated Red Teaming of Agent Skills through Attack Path Refinement5 Apr
- 2026Skill-Inject: Measuring Agent Vulnerability to Skill File Attacks23 Feb
- 2026Agent Skills in the Wild: An Empirical Study of Security Vulnerabilities at Scale15 Jan
- 2025SEC-bench: Automated Benchmarking of LLM Agents on Real-World Software Security Tasks13 Jun
- 2025WASP: Benchmarking Web Agent Security Against Prompt Injection Attacks22 Apr
- 2024AgentHarm: A Benchmark for Measuring Harmfulness of LLM Agents11 Oct
- 2024AgentPoison: Red-teaming LLM Agents via Poisoning Memory or Knowledge Bases17 Jul
- 2023Identifying the Risks of LM Agents with an LM-Emulated Sandbox25 Sep
Other references · 27
- 2023Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arenacited by 8,393
- 2023SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?cited by 3,193
- 2023G-Eval: NLG Evaluation using GPT-4 with Better Human Alignmentcited by 2,205
- 2023WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agentscited by 1,908
- 2024LiveCodeBench: Holistic and Contamination Free Evaluation of Large Language Models for Codecited by 1,906
- 2023ToolLLM: Facilitating Large Language Models to Master 16000+ Real-world APIscited by 1,880
- 2023Not what you've signed up for: Compromising Real-World LLM-Integrated Applications with Indirect Prompt Injectioncited by 1,339
- 2024τ-bench: A Benchmark for Tool-Agent-User Interaction in Real-World Domainscited by 1,280
- 2024OSWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Open-Ended Tasks in Real Computer Environmentscited by 1,134
- 2023Prompt Injection attack against LLM-integrated Applicationscited by 568
- 2026GLM-5: from Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineeringcited by 502
- 2024MLE-bench: Evaluating Machine Learning Agents on Machine Learning Engineeringcited by 429
15 more
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- 2024StruQ: Defending Against Prompt Injection with Structured Queriescited by 325
- 2024TheAgentCompany: Benchmarking LLM Agents on Consequential Real World Taskscited by 306
- 2026SkillsBench: Benchmarking How Well Agent Skills Work Across Diverse Taskscited by 289
- 2024ToolSandbox: A Stateful, Conversational, Interactive Evaluation Benchmark for LLM Tool Use Capabilitiescited by 272
- 2023Benchmarking and Defending Against Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks on Large Language Modelscited by 237
- 2025SkillWeaver: Web Agents can Self-Improve by Discovering and Honing Skillscited by 174
- 2023TaskBench: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Task Automationcited by 138
- 2026SoK: Agentic Skills -- Beyond Tool Use in LLM Agentscited by 120
- 2025Inducing Programmatic Skills for Agentic Taskscited by 103
- 2024GTA: A Benchmark for General Tool Agentscited by 77
- 2026SkillX: Automatically Constructing Skill Knowledge Bases for Agentscited by 69
- 2026Agent Skills: A Data-Driven Analysis of Claude Skills for Extending Large Language Model Functionalitycited by 66
- 2025ALE-Bench: A Benchmark for Long-Horizon Objective-Driven Algorithm Engineeringcited by 30
- 2026BadSkill: Backdoor Attacks on Agent Skills via Model-in-Skill Poisoningcited by 25
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 15.
15 papers.
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- 2026MalSkillBench: A Runtime-Verified Benchmark of Malicious Agent Skillscited by 14
- 2026SkillHarm: Lifecycle-Aware Skill-Based Attacks via Automated Constructioncited by 4
- 2026ColluSkill: Adversarial Cross-Skill Composition for Evading Agent Skill Scannerscited by 3
- 2026AgentS4D: Benchmarking Runtime Risks across the Execution Lifecycle of LLM-Based Workspace Agentscited by 2
- 2026Practice Makes Unsafe: Skill Misevolution in Self-Improving LLM Agentscited by 2
- 2026Cross-Layer Misalignment Detection in Agent Skills: A Progressive Loading-Aware Contrastive Learning Approachcited by 1
- 2026HarnessSafe: Evaluating Safety Across Persistent Carriers in Agent Harnessescited by 1
- 2026TRUSS: Towards Task-Reliable and User-Safe Automated Agent Skill Generationcited by 0
- 2026MaliciousSkillBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Malicious Agent Skill Detectioncited by 0
- 2026ClawSentry: A Progressive Multi-Tier Security Monitor for Safeguarding Autonomous LLM Agentscited by 0
- 2026Towards a Systems Foundation for Agentic Skills: Architecture, Lifecycle, and Securitycited by 0
- 2026"You're Right, Let Me Fix It": How LLM Agents Damage Correct Work When Falsely Accusedcited by 0
- 2026Hiding in Plain Sight: Decoupling Pretext from Actuation for Skill Poisoning in LLM Agents30 Sep 2026
- 2026MMSkillRisk: Can Agents Stay Safe When Multimodal Skills Become Traps?28 Sep 2026
- 2026Trust the Brand, Lose Control: How Identity Hijacks LLM Agent Orchestration26 Sep 2026
- 2026"You're Right, Let Me Fix It": How LLM Agents Damage Correct Work When Falsely Accused26 Sep 2026
- 2026Towards a Systems Foundation for Agentic Skills: Architecture, Lifecycle, and Security30 Aug 2026
- 2026ClawSentry: A Progressive Multi-Tier Security Monitor for Safeguarding Autonomous LLM Agents21 Aug 2026
- 2026MaliciousSkillBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Malicious Agent Skill Detection20 Aug 2026
- 2026TRUSS: Towards Task-Reliable and User-Safe Automated Agent Skill Generation18 Aug 2026
- 2026Practice Makes Unsafe: Skill Misevolution in Self-Improving LLM Agents13 Aug 2026
- 2026ColluSkill: Adversarial Cross-Skill Composition for Evading Agent Skill Scanners10 Aug 2026
- 2026HarnessSafe: Evaluating Safety Across Persistent Carriers in Agent Harnesses7 Aug 2026
- 2026AgentS4D: Benchmarking Runtime Risks across the Execution Lifecycle of LLM-Based Workspace Agents29 Jul 2026
3 more
- 2026MalSkillBench: A Runtime-Verified Benchmark of Malicious Agent Skillscited by 14
- 2026SkillHarm: Lifecycle-Aware Skill-Based Attacks via Automated Constructioncited by 4
- 2026ColluSkill: Adversarial Cross-Skill Composition for Evading Agent Skill Scannerscited by 3
- 2026AgentS4D: Benchmarking Runtime Risks across the Execution Lifecycle of LLM-Based Workspace Agentscited by 2
- 2026Practice Makes Unsafe: Skill Misevolution in Self-Improving LLM Agentscited by 2
- 2026Cross-Layer Misalignment Detection in Agent Skills: A Progressive Loading-Aware Contrastive Learning Approachcited by 1
- 2026MaliciousSkillBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Malicious Agent Skill Detectioncited by 0
- 2026ClawSentry: A Progressive Multi-Tier Security Monitor for Safeguarding Autonomous LLM Agentscited by 0
- 2026Towards a Systems Foundation for Agentic Skills: Architecture, Lifecycle, and Securitycited by 0
- 2026"You're Right, Let Me Fix It": How LLM Agents Damage Correct Work When Falsely Accusedcited by 0
- 2026Trust the Brand, Lose Control: How Identity Hijacks LLM Agent Orchestrationcited by 0
- 2026MMSkillRisk: Can Agents Stay Safe When Multimodal Skills Become Traps?cited by 0
12 most cited of 13 All 13 (JSON)
- 2026Hiding in Plain Sight: Decoupling Pretext from Actuation for Skill Poisoning in LLM Agents30 Sep 2026
- 2026MMSkillRisk: Can Agents Stay Safe When Multimodal Skills Become Traps?28 Sep 2026
- 2026Trust the Brand, Lose Control: How Identity Hijacks LLM Agent Orchestration26 Sep 2026
- 2026"You're Right, Let Me Fix It": How LLM Agents Damage Correct Work When Falsely Accused26 Sep 2026
- 2026Towards a Systems Foundation for Agentic Skills: Architecture, Lifecycle, and Security30 Aug 2026
- 2026ClawSentry: A Progressive Multi-Tier Security Monitor for Safeguarding Autonomous LLM Agents21 Aug 2026
- 2026MaliciousSkillBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Malicious Agent Skill Detection20 Aug 2026
- 2026Practice Makes Unsafe: Skill Misevolution in Self-Improving LLM Agents13 Aug 2026
- 2026ColluSkill: Adversarial Cross-Skill Composition for Evading Agent Skill Scanners10 Aug 2026
- 2026AgentS4D: Benchmarking Runtime Risks across the Execution Lifecycle of LLM-Based Workspace Agents29 Jul 2026
- 2026Cross-Layer Misalignment Detection in Agent Skills: A Progressive Loading-Aware Contrastive Learning Approach12 Jul 2026
- 2026MalSkillBench: A Runtime-Verified Benchmark of Malicious Agent Skills5 Jun 2026
12 newest of 13 All 13 (JSON)
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- 2026OpenSkillRisk: Benchmarking Agent Safety When Using Real-World Risky Third-Party Skills
- 2026SkillSecurer: Detecting and Patching Prompt-Injection Vulnerabilities in AI Agent Skills
- 2026SafeClawBench: Separating Semantic, Audit-Evidence, and Sandbox Harm in Tool-Using LLM Agents
- 2026Agent Skill Security: Threat Models, Attacks, Defenses, and Evaluation
- 2026BLINDSPOT: A Benchmark for Safety and Refusal Calibration in Long-Horizon Tool-Using Agents
- 2025OpenAgentSafety: A Comprehensive Framework for Evaluating Real-World AI Agent Safety