Coding Agent Skill File Attacks

Arxiv pdf 2026-08-01T00:00:00
arXiv Paper — PDF not available. Only the Executive Summary is available here. To read or download the full paper, visit the arXiv abstract page.

Abstract

Autonomous coding agents are increasingly embedded in enterprise software workflows with delegated authority over connected systems. Central to this architecture is the agent skills interface: folders of instructions and scripts that agents load dynamically to specialize their behavior. This interface also widens the attack surface, letting malicious shell commands hide within natural-language skill files. We make three contributions. First, an adversarial skill-synthesis method using six LLMs across four families to transform 471 real-world shell commands into benign-appearing skills, released as a benchmark of 2,826 skills mapped to 11 MITRE ATT&CK tactics. Second, a reproducible evaluation pipeline coupling run stratification, evidence anchoring, a refusal veto, and a deterministic declared-intent override with a three-judge LLM-as-a-judge panel, validated against a blind human gold standard (Cohens __ = 0 _._ 85). Third, a large-scale characterization of two enterprisegrade agents across 5,629 completed runs. Gemini CLI is exploited in 95.596.1% of runs and Qwen Code in 71.674.0% (raw majority vote to declared-intent-corrected estimate, both within the human gold standard), nearly invariant to the generating model. Explicit safety recognition occurs in only 1.99% of runs. Enterprises must assess and mitigate skill-interface risk before adopting coding agents. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/awsm-research/AgentJailbreak.

Loading executive summary...

LINK COPIED TO CLIPBOARD