Detecting Insecure Compositions of Clean Agent Skills via Capability-Flow Graph Analysis

Abstract

AI agents increasingly extend their capabilities by invoking third-party skills, where each skill encapsulates instructions, scripts, and resources for agents to execute on demand. This paper reveals that deploying many benign skills together introduces compositional security risks: multiple individually clean skills can compose into safety-violation chains, because the agent passes an upstream skill's output to a downstream skill's input across invocations. The risk arises not from any single skill, but from the agent's runtime orchestration, and thus cannot be captured by existing malicious skill detection methods. To this end, we develop KnotScryer to detect insecure skill compositions by treating skills as typed capability flows. In particular, we abstract each skill into a capability summary, and construct the Skill Capability-Flow Graph (SCFG), where edges denote cross-skill information flow. Moreover, we design a search policy that tracks protected or untrusted data along handoff edges to locate paths reaching insecure operations. Finally, a two-layer verification method replays the insecure information flow for reachability analysis and applies a task-anchored LLM chain audit to confirm the semantic plausibility of the identified violation chains. We deploy KnotScryer to analyze 13,598 clean skills from ClawHub, and validate the detected chains across three agent frameworks and three LLMs. KnotScryer identifies 612 insecure compositions, which are consistently exploited across agent frameworks. Meanwhile, under GLM-5.1, it outperforms tag-match and graph-only baselines by improving the exploitation rate from 16.5%-18.2% to 85.6%, while reducing the search space by 85.3%. Furthermore, 13.7% of the detected chains consist entirely of skills labeled safe by a single-skill scanner, showing that KnotScryer effectively identifies insecure compositions that per-skill auditing cannot.

arXiv comment11 pages, 5 figures, 5 tables