SkillMutator: Benchmarking and Defending Language-and-Code Cross-modal Attacks on LLM Agent Skills
About
Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly extend their capabilities at runtime by loading Agent Skills, which pair natural-language specifications (SKILL.md) with executable scripts and resources. Because a skill's behavior relies on both natural-language instructions and executable code, assessing its safety requires cross-modal reasoning, creating a new language-and-code attack surface. Attackers can present a benign workflow in SKILL.md while embedding implicit directives that steer the agent to exfiltrate sensitive files, even if the scripts appear harmless. This attack surface remains understudied; prior work treats skills merely as prompt-injection vectors or static code artifacts, leaving attacks emerging from cross-modal interactions largely unmeasured. In our evaluation, open-source and commercial skill scanners detect only 2%-8% and 9%-17% of such attacks, respectively. To address this gap, we introduce SkillMutator, the first benchmark for install-time detection of language-and-code cross-modal attacks on Agent Skills. It emulates an adversarial mutation process across 13 attack categories, iteratively refining malicious skills using scanner feedback to make injected behaviors indistinguishable from legitimate workflows. We further propose a four-phase reasoning-trajectory distillation framework to distill frontier-teacher traces into smaller open-weight models. This produces a locally deployable scanner avoiding third-party data exposure and excessive API costs. On the strongest SkillMutator subset (n=76), our distilled model (Qwen2.5-Coder-7B-Instruct) improves detection from 17.1% to 88.2%, surpassing GPT-4o-mini (23.7%) and GPT-5.4-mini (79.0%), and reaching frontier-level GPT-5.4 (86.8%). These results show practical defense against cross-modal attacks is feasible without relying on costly frontier models.