CompoSkill: Compositional Skill Chain Attacks from Individually Scanner-Passing LLM Agent Skills
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent threats, guardrails and governance
Abstract (arXiv)
Autonomous AI agents tackling Long Horizon Tasks depend on marketplace skills that are certified one at a time: a scanner returns a safety verdict for each skill and declares the ecosystem safe if every package passes. We show that this assumption fails under skill composition. A skill may pass the per-skill scanner individually yet participate in a risky composition when an agent connects its outputs, capabilities, or side effects with those of other scanner-passing skills. This makes skill composition risk a path level property rather than a node level property, explaining why existing skill scanners that inspect individual packages achieve limited interception. To study this threat, we present CompoSkill, a framework that constructs skill composition attacks through a dual attacker system. The white-box attacker knows the victim's installed skill pool and directly injects explicit skill-id sequences; the black-box attacker knows only a role profile, downloads the top marketplace skills for that scenario, builds a Skill Composition Graph, and searches for high risk chains whose implicit lures never name skill identifiers. We further construct CompoSkill-Bench, a benchmark of 1,140 records built from long-horizon professional workflows across five threats and six scenarios on OpenClaw and Nanobot. CompoSkill achieves risk Chain Formation Rates (CFR) up to 83.3% in the white box setting and 80.6% in the black box setting, while existing skill scanners block only a limited fraction of the risky compositions. Finally, we observe a bridge-bonus-then-hop-decay pattern: a bridge skill can increase attack success, but Attack Success Rate (ASR) decreases once additional hops make the risk chain longer than three skills. These results expose a systematic gap in single skill certification for autonomous AI agents.
Key facts. Cited by 2 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 18 of its 24 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 17 Aug 2026.
Builds on
18 of 24 references.
Closest ancestors · 10
Same direction, newest first
- 2026PhantomSkill: Malicious Code Injection in Agent Skill Ecosystems17 Jun
- 2026Dynamic Malicious Skills in Agentic AI15 Jun
- 2026Benign in Isolation, Harmful in Composition: Security Risks in Agent Skill Ecosystems13 Jun
- 2026When Safe Skills Collide: Measuring Compositional Risk in Agent Skill Ecosystems30 May
- 2026SkillTrojan: Backdoor Attacks on Skill-Based Agent Systems8 Apr
- 2026Skill-Inject: Measuring Agent Vulnerability to Skill File Attacks23 Feb
- 2026SkillJect: Effectively Automating Skill-Based Prompt Injection for Skill-Enabled Agents15 Feb
- 2026Agent Skills in the Wild: An Empirical Study of Security Vulnerabilities at Scale15 Jan
- 2025Memory Injection Attacks on LLM Agents via Query-Only Interaction5 Mar
- 2024AgentPoison: Red-teaming LLM Agents via Poisoning Memory or Knowledge Bases17 Jul
Other references · 8
- 2025Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilitiescited by 3,655
- 2026Kimi K2.5: Visual Agentic Intelligencecited by 449
- 2024Great, Now Write an Article About That: The Crescendo Multi-Turn LLM Jailbreak Attackcited by 364
- 2026Agent Skills: A Data-Driven Analysis of Claude Skills for Extending Large Language Model Functionalitycited by 66
- 2026BadSkill: Backdoor Attacks on Agent Skills via Model-in-Skill Poisoningcited by 25
- 2026Agentic Proposing: Enhancing Large Language Model Reasoning via Compositional Skill Synthesiscited by 11
- 2026Structured Security Auditing and Robustness Enhancement for Untrusted Agent Skillscited by 6
- 2026Formal Security Analysis of Agent Protocol Compositioncited by 2
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.
2 papers.
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026ColluSkill: Adversarial Cross-Skill Composition for Evading Agent Skill Scanners
- 2026Pretext: Defeating Malicious Skill Detection Frameworks for AI Agents
- 2026SkillAttack: Automated Red Teaming of Agent Skills through Attack Path Refinement
- 2026SkillHarm: Lifecycle-Aware Skill-Based Attacks via Automated Construction
- 2026SkillSecurer: Detecting and Patching Prompt-Injection Vulnerabilities in AI Agent Skills
- 2026Auto-Policy, not Auto-Skill: Compiled Agent Skills for the Physical World
- 2026When Experience Becomes Instruction: Trajectory Poisoning in Self-Evolving Agent Skill Systems
- 2026Can Agents Trust Their Skills? Uncovering Unsafe Chains of Trust in Skill-Based LLM Agents