AgentTrap: Measuring Runtime Trust Failures in Third-Party Agent Skills
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent threats, guardrails and governance
Abstract (arXiv)
Third-party skills are becoming the package ecosystem for LLM agents. They package natural-language instructions, helper scripts, templates, documents, and service configuration into reusable workflows. This makes skills useful, but it also introduces a new security problem: a malicious skill does not need to ask the model to perform an obviously harmful action. Instead, it can disguise the harmful behavior as part of a routine workflow, relying on the agent to execute that workflow with high-value permissions and limited human supervision. We introduce AgentTrap, a dynamic benchmark for evaluating whether LLM agents can use third-party skills while resisting malicious runtime behavior. AgentTrap contains 141 tasks: 91 malicious tasks and 50 benign utility tasks, covering 16 security-impact dimensions grounded in agent-skill supply-chain threats. In each task, the agent receives an ordinary user request, runs with installed skills that may contain malicious workflow elements, and is executed in a sandboxed environment. AgentTrap then judges complete trajectories for attack success, blocked or refused behavior, attack-not-triggered cases, and no-attack-evidence outcomes. Our central finding is that the most informative failures are not simple jailbreaks. Models often complete the visible user task while treating unsafe side effects introduced by the skill as part of the normal workflow. This motivates runtime evaluation of the concrete model--framework--workspace environment in which users actually delegate work. Code and data are available at https://github.com/zhmzm/AgentTrap and https://huggingface.co/datasets/zhmzm/AgentTrap.
Key facts. Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Agent threats, guardrails and governance, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 13 of its 19 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 13 May 2026.
Builds on
13 of 19 references.
Closest ancestors · 12
Same direction, newest first
- 2026Semia: Auditing Agent Skills via Constraint-Guided Representation Synthesis1 May
- 2026HarmfulSkillBench: How Do Harmful Skills Weaponize Your Agents?16 Apr
- 2026Your Agent, Their Asset: A Real-World Safety Analysis of OpenClaw6 Apr
- 2026How Your Credentials Are Leaked by LLM Agent Skills: An Empirical Study3 Apr
- 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
- 2026Agent Skills in the Wild: An Empirical Study of Security Vulnerabilities at Scale15 Jan
- 2025MCP Security Bench (MSB): Benchmarking Attacks Against Model Context Protocol in LLM Agents14 Oct
- 2024AgentHarm: A Benchmark for Measuring Harmfulness of LLM Agents11 Oct
- 2024AgentPoison: Red-teaming LLM Agents via Poisoning Memory or Knowledge Bases17 Jul
- 2024InjecAgent: Benchmarking Indirect Prompt Injections in Tool-Integrated Large Language Model Agents5 Mar
- 2023Identifying the Risks of LM Agents with an LM-Emulated Sandbox25 Sep
Other references · 1
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 12.
12 papers.
- 2026AIRGuard: Guarding Agent Actions with Runtime Authority Controlcited by 13
- 2026VIGIL: Runtime Enforcement of Behavioral Specifications in AI Agent Skillscited by 9
- 2026Right Family, Wrong Skill: Evaluating Risk Exposure in Agent Skill Retrievalcited by 4
- 2026MaliciousSkillBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Malicious Agent Skill Detectioncited by 1
- 2026EvoSkill Injection: Red-Teaming Autonomous Skill Generation and Evolution in Self-Evolving Agentscited by 1
- 2026Versioned Transitive Dependency-Closure Binding and Operation-Time Effect Governance for Agent Skills: ClosureBoundcited by 1
- 2026From Execution to Capability: Scientific Experience Consolidation via Procedural Knowledge Synthesiscited by 0
- 2026MMSkillRisk: Can Agents Stay Safe When Multimodal Skills Become Traps?cited by 0
- 2026Hiding in Plain Sight: Decoupling Pretext from Actuation for Skill Poisoning in LLM Agentscited by 0
- 2026Evaluate the Stack, Not the Layer: Do Deterministic and LLM Gates for Agent Actions Fail Independently?cited by 0
- 2026StateHarness: Maintaining Evolving Project State for Long-Horizon Coding Agentscited by 0
- 2026SkillScreen: High-Recall Screening of Malicious Agent Skills with Decision Modelscited by 0
- 2026SkillScreen: High-Recall Screening of Malicious Agent Skills with Decision Models13 Oct 2026
- 2026StateHarness: Maintaining Evolving Project State for Long-Horizon Coding Agents13 Oct 2026
- 2026Evaluate the Stack, Not the Layer: Do Deterministic and LLM Gates for Agent Actions Fail Independently?5 Oct 2026
- 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
- 2026Versioned Transitive Dependency-Closure Binding and Operation-Time Effect Governance for Agent Skills: ClosureBound5 Sep 2026
- 2026EvoSkill Injection: Red-Teaming Autonomous Skill Generation and Evolution in Self-Evolving Agents31 Aug 2026
- 2026MaliciousSkillBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Malicious Agent Skill Detection20 Aug 2026
- 2026From Execution to Capability: Scientific Experience Consolidation via Procedural Knowledge Synthesis27 Jul 2026
- 2026VIGIL: Runtime Enforcement of Behavioral Specifications in AI Agent Skills25 Jun 2026
- 2026Right Family, Wrong Skill: Evaluating Risk Exposure in Agent Skill Retrieval9 Jun 2026
- 2026AIRGuard: Guarding Agent Actions with Runtime Authority Control27 May 2026
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
- 2026Towards Secure Agent Skills: Architecture, Threat Taxonomy, and Security Analysis
- 2026OpenSkillRisk: Benchmarking Agent Safety When Using Real-World Risky Third-Party Skills
- 2026Agent Skills Can Be Harmful: An Empirical Study of Skill-Induced Failures in LLM Agents
- 2026Behavioral Integrity Verification for AI Agent Skills
- 2026SKILLLITE: Evidence-Guided Malicious Skill Auditing with Compact LLMs
- 2026Proteus: A Self-Evolving Red Team for Agent Skill Ecosystems
- 2026Towards a Risk Assessment of Malicious Skill Files in Coding Agents