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Behavioral Integrity Verification for AI Agent Skills (arxiv.org)
1 point by Timofeibu 144 days ago | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A checker compares what a downloadable agent skill claims to do with what its code and instructions really do, using code analysis plus an AI reader. Across thousands of real skills, 80% strayed from their descriptions, mostly through sloppy work rather than deliberate attacks.

Abstract

Agent skills extend LLM agents with privileged third-party capabilities such as filesystem access, credentials, network calls, and shell execution. Existing safety work catches malicious prompts and risky runtime actions, but the skill artifact itself goes unverified. We formalize this as the behavioral integrity verification (BIV) problem: a typed set comparison between declared and actual capabilities over a shared taxonomy that bridges code, instructions, and metadata. The BIV framework instantiates this comparison by pairing deterministic code analysis with LLM-assisted capability extraction. The resulting structured evidence supports three downstream analyses: deviation taxonomy, root-cause classification, and malicious-skill detection. On 49,943 skills from the OpenClaw registry, the deviation taxonomy reveals a pervasive description-implementation gap: 80.0% of skills deviate from declared behavior, with four novel compound-threat categories surfaced. Root-cause classification finds that deviations are mostly oversight, not malice: 81.1% trace to developer oversight and 18.9% to adversarial intent, with 5.0% of skills carrying predicted multi-stage attack chains. On a 906-skill malicious-skill detection benchmark, BIV reaches an F1 of 0.946, outperforming state-of-the-art rule-based and single-pass LLM baselines. These results demonstrate behavioral integrity auditing for agent skills at scale.

Yuhao Wu, Tung-Ling Li, Hongliang Liu
arXiv:2605.11770 · cs.CR, cs.AI, eess.SY · submitted May 12, 2026
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