Towards a Risk Assessment of Malicious Skill Files in Coding Agents

arXiv:2608.05223 · cs.SE, cs.CR · Submitted 2026-08-05 · Read on arXiv

Rui Yang, Michael Fu, Kla Tantithamthavorn, Chetan Arora, Joey Chua

cs.SE, cs.CR

Submitted: 2026-08-05

Comments: 29 pages, 6 figures, 6 tables. Preprint; under review

Code: https://github.com/awsm-research/AgentJailbreak

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: Autonomous coding agents are increasingly embedded in enterprise software workflows with delegated authority over connected systems.

Terminology

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 (Cohen's kappa = 0.85). Third, a large-scale characterization of two enterprise-grade agents across 5,629 completed runs. Gemini CLI is exploited in 95.5-96.1% of runs and Qwen Code in 71.6-74.0% (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

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