SkillGuard: A Permission-Centric Framework for Agent Skill Security

Abstract

Skills extend LLM agents with reusable instructions, scripts, data, and tool bindings. This shift makes skills a new security principal in agent systems: a skill can alter the agent's reasoning before any tool is called, and it can also steer the agent toward actions with concrete side effects. However, current skill ecosystems lack a permission model that captures this dual role. Existing defenses either inspect skill files before use or constrain individual tool calls during execution, leaving the connection between skill-level intent, contextual influence, and runtime behavior weakly governed. In this paper, we present SkillGuard, a skill-centric permission framework that treats skills as permission-bearing executable artifacts. SkillGuard introduces a dual-plane governance model that jointly regulates context influence and action side effects through skill manifests, runtime permission control, user interaction, and policy enforcement. We evaluate the permission taxonomy expressiveness on 1,260 real-world skills, and 99.93% of observed protected objects are covered. In adversarial evaluations on SkillInject dataset, SkillGuard reduces attack success rate from 35.3% to 20.7% for contextual injections and from 36.7% to 18.0% for obvious injections, while decently maintaining benign task completion. These results suggest that SkillGuard, as a skill-centric permission framework, can provide a practical foundation for improving the security of agent skill ecosystems.