ResearchResearch paperSafety & Alignment1 source · Oct 13, 2026

Encrypted Skills Can Become New Security Exploits If AI Agents Know How to Decipher

We introduce Ciphered Skill Injection (CSI), which embeds such instructions in skill files for agents to decode and follow.

Key points

  • Third-party skills can expose LLM agents to malicious instructions hidden by encoding.
  • We evaluate Caesar and layered variants across eight models and 139 injection-task pairs, separating instruction recovery from attack success.
  • Successful decoding does not guarantee attack success, and layering has model-dependent effects.
  • These findings highlight the risk of promoting decoded, untrusted content into actionable instructions.

Sources (1)

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