mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

MaliciousSkillBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Malicious Agent Skill Detection

arXiv 2608.19901 ↗First posted 20 Aug 2026cs.CR cs.AIcited by 0

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent threats, guardrails and governance

Abstract (arXiv)

Agent Skills extend LLM agents with reusable instruction packages that may also include scripts, resources, and service configuration. This creates a direct distribution channel for malicious behavior, yet existing malicious-Skill datasets are fragmented across sources, artifact formats, evidence regimes, and benign coverage; duplicated and structurally related content further complicates direct aggregation and evaluation. We present MaliciousSkillBench, a comprehensive benchmark for malicious Agent Skill detection. We consolidate 13 public sources, 11 of which contribute Core malicious artifacts, and reduce 8,414 raw malicious records to 7,539 normalized-unique identities in 4,588 operational structural families. After conservative cross-label conflict exclusion, the primary benchmark contains 9,740 Skills: 7,505 malicious and 2,235 benign. To characterize its coverage, we harmonize 11 attack categories for 4,983 malicious identities with supported source-native mappings and find substantial differences in threat composition across sources. We then evaluate three learned text detectors and three off-the-shelf Skill scanners. Learned detectors achieve 0.882-0.932 Random Macro-F1 but only 0.653-0.665 under Source-Disjoint evaluation; the strongest word TF-IDF SVM scores 0.932/0.916/0.665 on Random/structural-disjoint/Source-Disjoint while retaining 95.6% malicious recall but producing 62.4% benign FPR on held-out sources. Off-the-shelf scanners occupy different but also unsatisfactory operating regimes, reducing false positives only at the cost of sharply lower malicious recall. Together, these results show that reliable malicious-Skill detection requires both broader cross-source benchmark coverage and evaluation that jointly measures attack detection and benign over-flagging.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Agent threats, guardrails and governance, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 23 of its 26 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 20 Aug 2026.

Builds on

23 of 26 references.

Closest ancestors · 19

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026ColluSkill: Adversarial Cross-Skill Composition for Evading Agent Skill Scanners10 Aug
  2. 2026SkillGate: Cost Efficient Runtime Malicious Skill File Detection in Coding Agents28 Jul
  3. 2026Cloak and Detonate: Scanner Evasion and Dynamic Detection of Agent Skill Malware2 Jul
  4. 2026Detecting Malicious Agent Skills in the Wild using Attention22 Jun
  5. 2026Seeing Is Not Screening: Multimodal Hidden Instruction Attacks on Agent Skill Scanners16 Jun
  6. 2026Runtime Skill Audit: Targeted Runtime Probing for Agent Skill Security10 Jun
  7. 2026MalSkillBench: A Runtime-Verified Benchmark of Malicious Agent Skills5 Jun
  8. 2026SkillHarm: Lifecycle-Aware Skill-Based Attacks via Automated Construction1 Jun
  9. 2026When Safe Skills Collide: Measuring Compositional Risk in Agent Skill Ecosystems30 May
  10. 2026AgentTrap: Measuring Runtime Trust Failures in Third-Party Agent Skills13 May
  11. 2026SkillSafetyBench: Evaluating Agent Safety under Skill-Facing Attack Surfaces12 May
  12. 2026RouteGuard: Internal-Signal Detection of Skill Poisoning in LLM Agents24 Apr
7 more
  1. 2026SkillTrojan: Backdoor Attacks on Skill-Based Agent Systems8 Apr
  2. 2026How Your Credentials Are Leaked by LLM Agent Skills: An Empirical Study3 Apr
  3. 2026Formal Analysis and Supply Chain Security for Agentic AI Skills27 Feb
  4. 2026Skill-Inject: Measuring Agent Vulnerability to Skill File Attacks23 Feb
  5. 2026Agent Skills in the Wild: An Empirical Study of Security Vulnerabilities at Scale15 Jan
  6. 2025MCPTox: A Benchmark for Tool Poisoning Attack on Real-World MCP Servers19 Aug
  7. 2024Agent Security Bench (ASB): Formalizing and Benchmarking Attacks and Defenses in LLM-based Agents3 Oct

Other references · 4

  1. 2020WILDS: A Benchmark of in-the-Wild Distribution Shiftscited by 1,366
  2. 2020In Search of Lost Domain Generalizationcited by 1,042
  3. 2018Annotation Artifacts in Natural Language Inference Datacited by 656
  4. 2026ClawHub Security Signals: When VirusTotal, Static Analysis, and SkillSpector Disagreecited by 4

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  1. 2026SkillsMetric: Mapping the Detection Boundary of Static Analysis for Malicious Agent Skills
  2. 2026SkillSieve: A Hierarchical Triage Framework for Detecting Malicious AI Agent Skills
  3. 2026SkillAtlas: An Attack Trace Library for Agent Skills
  4. 2026"Do Not Mention This to the User": Detecting and Understanding Malicious Agent Skills in the Wild
  5. 2026Benchmarking Security Risk Detection and Verification in Open Agentic Skill Ecosystems
  6. 2026Towards a Risk Assessment of Malicious Skill Files in Coding Agents
  7. 2026SKILLLITE: Evidence-Guided Malicious Skill Auditing with Compact LLMs
  8. 2026Behavioral Integrity Verification for AI Agent Skills