OWASP Agentic Skills Top 10: Security Risks and Mitigations for Agentic Skill Ecosystems

The OWASP Agentic Skills Top 10 (August 2026 publication) provides the first comprehensive framework for securing agent skill ecosystems—modular bundles of instructions and code that extend AI agent capabilities. 

The document identifies ten critical risk categories: Malicious Skills (AST01), Supply Chain Compromise (AST02), Over-Privileged Skills (AST03), Insecure Metadata (AST04), Untrusted External Instructions (AST05), Weak Isolation (AST06), Update Drift (AST07), Poor Scanning (AST08), No Governance (AST09), and Cross-Platform Reuse (AST10). Each risk is documented with real-world evidence including the ClawHavoc campaign (1,184 malicious skills), Snyk's ToxicSkills research (280+ leaky skills), and CVE incidents like ClawJacked and Claude Code vulnerabilities. 

The framework provides attack scenarios, preventive mitigations, code examples, and mappings to OWASP AISVS controls, CSA MAESTRO layers, and other industry standards. It emphasizes that skills combine natural-language instructions with executable code, creating unique attack surfaces that traditional security tools miss. 

The document proposes a Universal Agentic Skill Format with cryptographic signatures, permission manifests, and content hashing to address cross-platform security property loss. It concludes with implementation guidance for bilateral audit receipts and governance workflows, calling for capability-based permission systems, mandatory security reviews, runtime sandboxing, and continuous monitoring to secure this rapidly growing ecosystem. 

https://owasp.org/www-project-agentic-skills-top-10/assets/publications/ast10-top10-whitepaper-2.pdf

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