Runtime Skill Audit: Targeted Runtime Probing for Agent Skill Security
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent threats, guardrails and governance
Abstract (arXiv)
Agent skills let LLM agents reuse instructions, resources, tools, and workflows, but they also create a new place for malicious behavior to hide. A skill may look benign in its documentation or code while becoming harmful only when it is invoked with particular user requests, local assets, persistent state, or multi-step tool interactions. This makes purely static vetting brittle. We present Runtime Skill Audit (RSA), a dynamic analysis method that audits skills by asking what the skill-mediated agent actually does under targeted runtime conditions. Instead of testing every skill with the same generic tasks, RSA profiles risk-relevant interfaces, prepares the execution context needed to exercise them, and assigns security labels from the resulting trace evidence. We instantiate RSA on OpenClaw and evaluate it on 100 skills against representative static baselines. RSA achieves 90.0% accuracy with an 88.0% true positive rate and an 8.0% false positive rate, improving accuracy by 13.0 percentage points over the best static baseline. Under self-evolving attacks, static detectors collapse after one or two rounds, while RSA continues to detect 19--20 out of 20 malicious skills across rounds.
Key facts. Cited by 3 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 16 of its 31 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 10 Jun 2026.
Builds on
16 of 31 references.
Closest ancestors · 9
Same direction, newest first
- 2026Semia: Auditing Agent Skills via Constraint-Guided Representation Synthesis1 May
- 2026Your Agent, Their Asset: A Real-World Safety Analysis of OpenClaw6 Apr
- 2026SkillAttack: Automated Red Teaming of Agent Skills through Attack Path Refinement5 Apr
- 2026Formal Analysis and Supply Chain Security for Agentic AI Skills27 Feb
- 2026Skill-Inject: Measuring Agent Vulnerability to Skill File Attacks23 Feb
- 2026Agent Skills in the Wild: An Empirical Study of Security Vulnerabilities at Scale15 Jan
- 2026BackdoorAgent: A Unified Framework for Backdoor Attacks on LLM-based Agents8 Jan
- 2025TraceAegis: Securing LLM-Based Agents via Hierarchical and Behavioral Anomaly Detection13 Oct
- 2025MindGuard: Intrinsic Decision Inspection for Securing LLM Agents Against Metadata Poisoning28 Aug
Other references · 7
- 2023Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learningcited by 4,276
- 2023Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behaviorcited by 3,568
- 2023GPTFUZZER: Red Teaming Large Language Models with Auto-Generated Jailbreak Promptscited by 560
- 2024AutoDAN-Turbo: A Lifelong Agent for Strategy Self-Exploration to Jailbreak LLMscited by 199
- 2026Agent Skills: A Data-Driven Analysis of Claude Skills for Extending Large Language Model Functionalitycited by 72
- 2026SkillRet: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Skill Retrieval in LLM Agentscited by 39
- 2026MAGIC: A Co-Evolving Attacker-Defender Adversarial Game for Robust LLM Safetycited by 21
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 3.
3 papers.
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026SkillAtlas: An Attack Trace Library for Agent Skills
- 2026Benchmarking Security Risk Detection and Verification in Open Agentic Skill Ecosystems
- 2026SkillsMetric: Mapping the Detection Boundary of Static Analysis for Malicious Agent Skills
- 2026SKILLLITE: Evidence-Guided Malicious Skill Auditing with Compact LLMs
- 2026SkillScope: Toward Fine-Grained Least-Privilege Enforcement for Agent Skills
- 2026Local LLM Agents as Vulnerable Runtimes:A Source-Code Audit of the Agent Runtime Layer
- 2026Why Static Skill Inconsistencies Do Not Equate to Runtime Risks: A Behavioral Analysis of LLM Agent Execution
- 2026RedAct: Redacting Agent Capability Traces for Procedural Skill Protection