Agent Skills Matter: Inferring Proprietary Skills from Execution Trajectories
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Abstract (arXiv)
Agent skills package reusable procedures that improve downstream performance. Their lightweight, portable form enables marketplace monetization and private deployment behind cloud-hosted agent interfaces, giving providers incentives to keep high-value skills proprietary. Yet hiding the artifacts does not conceal their behavioral effects, which remain observable in execution trajectories and form a behavioral side channel. We define this exposure as Skill Leakage: reconstructing proprietary skills from trajectories elicited by benign queries, without reference answers or success labels. We introduce SigLeak, a black-box framework that exploits recurring skill signatures in agent behavior. It constructs diverse, decision-rich diagnostic tasks, contrasts matched skill-enabled and skill-disabled trajectories, and iteratively refines a reconstructed skill from the isolated patterns. Across five scenarios, three model families, and three agent frameworks, SigLeak outperforms or matches three baselines in nearly every setting. It raises the success rate by 6.88 percentage points over the skill-disabled reference on average and achieves the highest overall SkillSim, our metric for coarse- and fine-grained semantic similarity. These results show that benign execution trajectories can expose proprietary procedural knowledge. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SigLeak-D1DB.
Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 35 of its 60 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 28 Jul 2026.
Builds on
35 of 60 references.
References · 35
- 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,355
- 2024SWE-agent: Agent-Computer Interfaces Enable Automated Software Engineeringcited by 1,628
- 2023The Rise and Potential of Large Language Model Based Agents: A Surveycited by 1,422
- 2020ALFWorld: Aligning Text and Embodied Environments for Interactive Learningcited by 1,143
- 2026SkillsBench: Benchmarking How Well Agent Skills Work Across Diverse Taskscited by 289
- 2026SkillRL: Evolving Agents via Recursive Skill-Augmented Reinforcement Learningcited by 252
- 2026Trace2Skill: Distill Trajectory-Local Lessons into Transferable Agent Skillscited by 161
- 2026SkillOpt: Executive Strategy for Self-Evolving Agent Skillscited by 122
- 2026SoK: Agentic Skills -- Beyond Tool Use in LLM Agentscited by 120
- 2024PLeak: Prompt Leaking Attacks against Large Language Model Applicationscited by 113
- 2024SpreadsheetBench: Towards Challenging Real World Spreadsheet Manipulationcited by 100
- 2025Unveiling Privacy Risks in LLM Agent Memorycited by 99
23 more
- 2025Reinforcement Learning for Self-Improving Agent with Skill Librarycited by 91
- 2023Effective Prompt Extraction from Language Modelscited by 83
- 2026SkillX: Automatically Constructing Skill Knowledge Bases for Agentscited by 69
- 2025SealQA: Raising the Bar for Reasoning in Search-Augmented Language Modelscited by 65
- 2026Memento-Skills: Let Agents Design Agentscited by 56
- 2026SkillNet: Create, Evaluate, and Connect AI Skillscited by 48
- 2024Large Language Model-based Human-Agent Collaboration for Complex Task Solvingcited by 38
- 2026SKILLFOUNDRY: Building Self-Evolving Agent Skill Libraries from Heterogeneous Scientific Resourcescited by 38
- 2026SkillGen: Verified Inference-Time Agent Skill Synthesiscited by 29
- 2025LLM-Based Human-Agent Collaboration and Interaction Systems: A Surveycited by 28
- 2026Formal Analysis and Supply Chain Security for Agentic AI Skillscited by 21
- 2026SkillGenBench: Benchmarking Skill Generation Pipelines for LLM Agentscited by 17
- 2026SkillEvolver: Skill Learning as a Meta-Skillcited by 12
- 2026Skills on the Fly: Test-Time Adaptive Skill Synthesis for LLM Agentscited by 10
- 2026SkillAdaptor: Self-Adapting Skills for LLM Agents from Trajectoriescited by 10
- 2026Skill Coverage: A Test Adequacy Metric for Agent Skillscited by 7
- 2026Black-Box Skill Stealing Attack from Proprietary LLM Agents: An Empirical Studycited by 6
- 2026Skill-Conditioned Gated Self-Distillation for LLM Reasoningcited by 6
- 2026Agent Skill Evaluation and Evolution: Frameworks and Benchmarkscited by 6
- 2026Skilldex: A Package Manager and Registry for Agent Skill Packages with Hierarchical Scope-Based Distributioncited by 5
- 2026COLLEAGUE.SKILL: Automated AI Skill Generation via Expert Knowledge Distillationcited by 3
- 2026MIND-Skill: Quality-Guaranteed Skill Generation via Multi-Agent Induction and Deductioncited by 2
- 2026RedAct: Redacting Agent Capability Traces for Procedural Skill Protectioncited by 2
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 4.
4 papers.
- 2026Behavioral Skill Reconstruction: Reconstructing Hidden Functionality from LLM Agent Skillscited by 2
- 2026Daydreaming: Stealing Hidden Agent Skills through Black-Box Task Interactioncited by 0
- 2026AgentLeak: Cloning Stronger LLM Agent Capabilities onto Weaker Agents Beyond Skill Stealingcited by 0
- 2026HEXIS: Compiling Agent Skills into Extended Finite State Machinescited by 0
- 2026HEXIS: Compiling Agent Skills into Extended Finite State Machines24 Sep 2026
- 2026AgentLeak: Cloning Stronger LLM Agent Capabilities onto Weaker Agents Beyond Skill Stealing7 Sep 2026
- 2026Daydreaming: Stealing Hidden Agent Skills through Black-Box Task Interaction27 Aug 2026
- 2026Behavioral Skill Reconstruction: Reconstructing Hidden Functionality from LLM Agent Skills4 Aug 2026