ArXiv TLDR

Semia: Auditing Agent Skills via Constraint-Guided Representation Synthesis

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2605.00314

Hongbo Wen, Ying Li, Hanzhi Liu, Chaofan Shou, Yanju Chen + 2 more

cs.CRcs.AIcs.PL

TLDR

Semia audits LLM agent skills by converting them into a Datalog fact base using CGRS, finding critical risks in over half of real-world skills.

Key contributions

  • Introduces Semia, a static auditor for LLM agent skills, addressing limitations of existing tools.
  • Lifts agent skills into Skill Description Language (SDL), a Datalog fact base for security analysis.
  • Develops Constraint-Guided Representation Synthesis (CGRS) to accurately translate skill prose into SDL.
  • Evaluated on 13,728 real skills, finding over 50% contain critical semantic security risks.

Why it matters

LLM-driven agents are increasingly common, but their "skills" (configurations) are hard to audit due to their hybrid nature (structured code + natural language prose). Semia provides a robust static analysis method to identify critical security vulnerabilities that current tools miss. This work is crucial for building trustworthy and secure AI agents.

Original Abstract

An agent skill is a configuration package that equips an LLM-driven agent with a concrete capability, such as reading email, executing shell commands, or signing blockchain transactions. Each skill is a hybrid artifact-a structured half declares executable interfaces, while a prose half dictates when and how those interfaces fire-and the prose is reinterpreted probabilistically on every invocation. Conventional static analyzers parse the structured half but ignore the prose; LLM-based tools read the prose but cannot reproducibly prove that a tainted input reaches a high-impact sink. We present Semia, a static auditor for agent skills. Semia lifts each skill into the Skill Description Language (SDL), a Datalog fact base that captures LLM-triggered actions, prose-defined conditions, and human-in-the-loop checkpoints. Synthesizing a fact base that is both structurally sound and semantically faithful to the original prose is the central challenge; we address it with Constraint-Guided Representation Synthesis (CGRS), a propose-verify-evaluate loop that refines LLM candidates until convergence. Security properties (e.g., indirect injection, secret leakage, confused deputies, unguarded sinks, etc.) over an agent skill can then be reduced to Datalog reachability queries. We evaluate Semia on 13,728 real-world skills from public marketplaces. Semia renders all of them auditable and finds that more than half carry at least one critical semantic risk. On a stratified sample of 541 expert-labeled skills, Semia achieves 97.7% recall and an F1 of 90.6%, substantially outperforming signature-based scanners and LLM baselines.

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