mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

MMSkillRisk: Can Agents Stay Safe When Multimodal Skills Become Traps?

arXiv 2609.35912 ↗First posted 28 Sep 2026cs.CR cs.AIcited by 0

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

Abstract (arXiv)

Agent skills are shareable packages of procedural instructions, tools, and examples. Multimodal skills additionally include visual references that agents retrieve and inspect during execution. Because these images guide actions, attackers can disguise malicious instructions as ordinary visual guidance within otherwise legitimate skills. Existing skill-security research primarily examines text-carried attacks or scanner detection, leaving the runtime effects of image-borne attacks insufficiently evaluated. We introduce MMSkillRisk, to our knowledge the first publicly available benchmark dedicated to end-to-end safety evaluation of image-borne attacks in multimodal skills. To instantiate this attack surface, we design Native-Context Visual Attack (NCVA), which disguises malicious instructions as native components of teaching images, such as annotations and interface labels. The accompanying SKILL.md provides auxiliary guidance toward relevant visual regions without explicitly stating the malicious operation. Built from 28 curated clean skills, MMSkillRisk contains 36 attack packages and 108 executable cases spanning five attack objectives, with separate checks for attack success and legitimate-task completion. Across nine model-harness configurations evaluated in isolated sandboxes, NCVA induces unauthorized operations in every configuration. Its pooled attack success rate (ASR) reaches 43.1%, exceeding the matched text-carrier baseline by 16.4 percentage points, with higher ASR in all nine configurations. Attack success and legitimate-task completion co-occur in 36.5% of cases, reaching 72.2% for GPT-5.6-sol with Codex. These results show that skill-bundled images can induce unauthorized actions even as agents complete legitimate tasks, so task success alone does not establish safe skill use. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/kaill-jlq/MMSkillRisk.

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 33 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 28 Sep 2026.

Builds on

23 of 33 references.

Closest ancestors · 10

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026OpenSkillRisk: Benchmarking Agent Safety When Using Real-World Risky Third-Party Skills22 Jul
  2. 2026Seeing Is Not Screening: Multimodal Hidden Instruction Attacks on Agent Skill Scanners16 Jun
  3. 2026MalSkillBench: A Runtime-Verified Benchmark of Malicious Agent Skills5 Jun
  4. 2026AgentTrap: Measuring Runtime Trust Failures in Third-Party Agent Skills13 May
  5. 2026SkillSafetyBench: Evaluating Agent Safety under Skill-Facing Attack Surfaces12 May
  6. 2026HarmfulSkillBench: How Do Harmful Skills Weaponize Your Agents?16 Apr
  7. 2026Supply-Chain Poisoning Attacks Against LLM Coding Agent Skill Ecosystems3 Apr
  8. 2026Formal Analysis and Supply Chain Security for Agentic AI Skills27 Feb
  9. 2026Skill-Inject: Measuring Agent Vulnerability to Skill File Attacks23 Feb
  10. 2026Agent Skills in the Wild: An Empirical Study of Security Vulnerabilities at Scale15 Jan

Other references · 13

  1. 2023Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Modelscited by 2,081
  2. 2026SkillsBench: Benchmarking How Well Agent Skills Work Across Diverse Taskscited by 289
  3. 2026Agent Skills for Large Language Models: Architecture, Acquisition, Security, and the Path Forwardcited by 105
  4. 2026Kimi K3: Open Frontier Intelligencecited by 99
  5. 2026XSkill: Continual Learning from Experience and Skills in Multimodal Agentscited by 71
  6. 2026DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash: Pushing the Limits of KV Cache Compressioncited by 34
  7. 2026On the Design of Qwen3.8-Next Architecture: Evaluation, Efficiency, and Training Stabilitycited by 20
  8. 2025Mirage-1: Augmenting and Updating GUI Agent with Hierarchical Multimodal Skillscited by 18
  9. 2026MMSkills: Towards Multimodal Skills for General Visual Agentscited by 13
  10. 2026VISUALSKILL: Multimodal Skills for Computer-Use Agentscited by 3
  11. 2026MMG2Skill: Can Agents Distill In-the-Wild Guides into Self-Evolving Skills?cited by 2
  12. 2026RESOURCE2SKILL: Distilling Executable Agent Skills from Human-Created Multimodal Resourcescited by 2
1 more
  1. 2026Agent Skills Should Go Beyond Text: The Case for Visual Skillscited by 1

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  1. 2026SkillSecurer: Detecting and Patching Prompt-Injection Vulnerabilities in AI Agent Skills
  2. 2026MaliciousSkillBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Malicious Agent Skill Detection
  3. 2026Behavioral Skill Reconstruction: Reconstructing Hidden Functionality from LLM Agent Skills
  4. 2026Pretext: Defeating Malicious Skill Detection Frameworks for AI Agents
  5. 2026RouteGuard: Internal-Signal Detection of Skill Poisoning in LLM Agents
  6. 2025Contextual Image Attack: How Visual Context Exposes Multimodal Safety Vulnerabilities
  7. 2026Towards a Risk Assessment of Malicious Skill Files in Coding Agents
  8. 2026An Experimental Evaluation of Multimodal Prompt Injection Attacks on Agentic AI Frameworks