EVOMAL: Self-Poisoning in Self-Evolving Coding Agents
Self-evolving LLM coding agents write their own tools by imitating retrieved skills from shared skill libraries. We identify a vulnerability in this loop: during authoring, a retrieved malicious skill can become the template for a new skill that preserves the payload. We call this self-poisoning: the agent authors, stores, and runs the resulting malicious skill. We exploit it through EvoMal, an attack that amplifies self-poisoning by wrapping an interchangeable payload in a banner, a set of benign-looking structural elements that induces an imitating agent to reproduce the enclosed code. The attacker plants malicious skills in the library without invoking them. The agent then authors and ...
| Authors | Xiaodong Wu, Yu Shi, Qi Li et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 26 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 26 August 2026 |
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