Defense-as-Skill: Evolving Runtime Guard Skill for Skill-Augmented Agents
Skill-augmented agents load reusable skills as persistent runtime context, improving task performance but also giving malicious skills a durable channel for steering future actions. Such skills may leak secrets, corrupt code, bypass approvals, or stage data for exfiltration only after a concrete user task and workspace state make the unsafe action appear useful. This makes pre-install vetting insufficient and calls for runtime, task-conditioned protection. We propose Defense-as-Skill, a defense paradigm that implements the runtime guard itself as an installable, inspectable, and editable skill. Our guard, SkillSonar, runs alongside untrusted task skills and checks sensitive actions agains...
| Authors | Xiaofang Yang, Ziqi Miao, Chen Qian et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 1 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 9 October 2026 |
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