arXiv subjects

Cuifeng Gao

Publications and source records attributed to Cuifeng Gao.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Demystifying Agent Skills for Smart Contract Auditing: Design, Effectiveness, Behavioral Impact

LLM agents, notably Claude Code and OpenAI Codex, are emerging as versatile tools beyond coding agents only. These agents can be enhanced with skills---reusable artifacts that package domain knowledge, workflows, and tool-use instructions. To date, however, little is known about how such skills are designed or how they affect agent effectiveness and behavior in practice. In this paper, we investigate these questions in smart contract security auditing, a domain in which agents have shown substantial promise. We systematically collect 83 smart contract audit skills from the wild and evaluate them on EVMBench across seven agent--model configurations. Our study examines three dimensions: (i) the design characteristics of audit skills, including their structure, knowledge representations, workflows, and tool dependencies; (ii) their effectiveness in improving vulnerability detection; and (iii) their influence on agent execution trajectories. We find that audit skills are mostly lightweight but heterogeneous in design, covering a broad yet imbalanced range of vulnerability types. Their effectiveness is determined primarily by the model rather than the agent harness: Codex/GPT-5.5 achieves the largest gains, improving detection score by 22.8% and captured award by 43.2%. We further find that skill triggering is a key bottleneck. When triggered, skills preserve a shared six-stage audit workflow while exhibiting distinct loading patterns and differential effects on agent behavior across configurations. We release our skill corpus and artifacts to support future research.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

MCPSecBench: A Systematic Security Benchmark and Playground for Testing Model Context Protocols

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into real-world applications via the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a universal open standard for connecting AI agents with data sources and external tools. While MCP enhances the capabilities of LLM-based agents, it also introduces new security risks and significantly expands their attack surface. In this paper, we present the first formalization of a secure MCP and its required specifications. Based on this foundation, we establish a comprehensive MCP security taxonomy that extends existing models by incorporating protocol-level and host-side threats, identifying 17 distinct attack types across four primary attack surfaces. Building on these specifications, we introduce MCPSecBench, a systematic security benchmark and playground that integrates prompt datasets, MCP servers, MCP clients, attack scripts, a GUI test harness, and protection mechanisms to evaluate these threats across three major MCP platforms. MCPSecBench is designed to be modular and extensible, allowing researchers to incorporate custom implementations of clients, servers, and transport protocols for rigorous assessment. Our evaluation across three major MCP platforms reveals that all attack surfaces yield successful compromises. Core vulnerabilities universally affect Claude, OpenAI, and Cursor, while server-side and specific client-side attacks exhibit considerable variability across different hosts and models. Furthermore, current protection mechanisms proved largely ineffective, achieving an average success rate of less than 30%. Overall, MCPSecBench standardizes the evaluation of MCP security and enables rigorous testing across all protocol layers.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

A Comprehensive Empirical Evaluation of Agent Frameworks on Code-centric Software Engineering Tasks

Unlike traditional automation tools or static LLM-based systems, agents combine decision-making and tool utilization to accomplish complex tasks, showing great potential in software engineering. However, existing studies largely focus on specific tasks or isolated aspects, providing an incomplete picture of agents' practical capabilities. To address this, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study evaluating seven general-purpose agent frameworks across three representative code-centric tasks: software development, vulnerability detection, and program repair. Each task is assessed using standard, widely adopted benchmarks to ensure objective and comparable evaluation. Agent performance is systematically analyzed from three complementary perspectives: effectiveness (task success), efficiency (execution process), and overhead (token consumption). Our findings reveal distinct capability patterns and trade-offs among the evaluated frameworks. In terms of effectiveness, agents achieve moderate overall performance. Regarding efficiency, AgentOrchestra tends to exhibit the longest trajectories and the most correction attempts due to coordination overhead, whereas OpenHands demonstrate stronger reflective reasoning abilities. For overhead, software development incurs the highest monetary cost, while GPTswarm remains the most cost-efficient. Furthermore, we conduct an in-depth cross-analysis of the relationship between effectiveness and efficiency, exploring the underlying reasons behind their interplay. These findings guide both practical adoption and future research toward more efficient software engineering agents.

cs.SE↗