Hiding in Plain Sight: Decoupling Pretext from Actuation for Skill Poisoning in LLM Agents
LLM agents increasingly rely on reusable Skills for complex, multi-step tasks, creating a critical supply-chain attack surface where poisoned Skill content steers agent decision loops under benign requests. Existing skill poisoning attacks either colocate actuation with its contextual pretext or distribute actuation across multiple Skills, but do not explicitly separate the rationale for execution from the operation itself. In this work, we reveal that untrusted agent decisions fundamentally depend on two conceptually distinct Risk-Realization Factors (RRFs): an actuation factor (specifying what concrete operation is performed) and a pretext factor (providing the situational rationale for...
| Authors | Wenxin Wu, Lingyong Yan, Lei Sha et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 30 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 30 September 2026 |
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