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Main Authors: Hossain, Ismail, Puppala, Sai, Lu, Zhuoran, Talukder, Sajedul, Jiang, Nan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00925
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author Hossain, Ismail
Puppala, Sai
Lu, Zhuoran
Talukder, Sajedul
Jiang, Nan
author_facet Hossain, Ismail
Puppala, Sai
Lu, Zhuoran
Talukder, Sajedul
Jiang, Nan
contents Open agent platforms allow community contributors to publish reusable skills that agents can invoke at runtime. This extensibility also creates a supply-chain risk: malicious contributors can hide harmful behavior inside skills that appear benign under superficial inspection. However, existing defenses are hard to evaluate because there is no benchmark that measures both malicious-skill detection and runtime verification. We present SkillVetBench, a two-stage security vetting benchmark for open agentic skill ecosystems. The first stage performs semantic vetting over each skill's natural-language specification to detect hidden malicious intent. The second stage executes flagged skills in an instrumented sandbox to observe runtime behavior and collect auditable evidence. We build a benchmark from confirmed malicious skills in the live OpenClaw ecosystem, including samples from the recent ClawHavoc supplychain campaign. Unlike static-only methods, SkillVetBench verifies detected threats with execution traces. Our experiments show that: (1) semantic-only and signature-based baselines are insufficient, missing up to 89\% of malicious skills whose threats arise from natural-language instructions, multicomponent logic, or cross-component interactions; (2) runtime attacks are concentrated in a small set of high-permission primitives, especially exec, write\_file, install\_skill, and spawn; and (3) SkillVetBench provides case studies in which sandbox execution directly supports malicious verdicts with concrete runtime evidence.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2606_00925
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Benchmarking Security Risk Detection and Verification in Open Agentic Skill Ecosystems
Hossain, Ismail
Puppala, Sai
Lu, Zhuoran
Talukder, Sajedul
Jiang, Nan
Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Open agent platforms allow community contributors to publish reusable skills that agents can invoke at runtime. This extensibility also creates a supply-chain risk: malicious contributors can hide harmful behavior inside skills that appear benign under superficial inspection. However, existing defenses are hard to evaluate because there is no benchmark that measures both malicious-skill detection and runtime verification. We present SkillVetBench, a two-stage security vetting benchmark for open agentic skill ecosystems. The first stage performs semantic vetting over each skill's natural-language specification to detect hidden malicious intent. The second stage executes flagged skills in an instrumented sandbox to observe runtime behavior and collect auditable evidence. We build a benchmark from confirmed malicious skills in the live OpenClaw ecosystem, including samples from the recent ClawHavoc supplychain campaign. Unlike static-only methods, SkillVetBench verifies detected threats with execution traces. Our experiments show that: (1) semantic-only and signature-based baselines are insufficient, missing up to 89\% of malicious skills whose threats arise from natural-language instructions, multicomponent logic, or cross-component interactions; (2) runtime attacks are concentrated in a small set of high-permission primitives, especially exec, write\_file, install\_skill, and spawn; and (3) SkillVetBench provides case studies in which sandbox execution directly supports malicious verdicts with concrete runtime evidence.
title Benchmarking Security Risk Detection and Verification in Open Agentic Skill Ecosystems
topic Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00925