Implicit Manipulation for Skill Selection in LLM Agents with Semantic Matching

Skill selection is a key stage in LLM-agent workflows, determining which installed skill should handle a user request. Existing attacks on this stage primarily rely on explicit prompt injection or instruction-level steering, which can expose recognizable manipulation signals. In this work, we identify a new implicit attack surface for skill selection: even when the user prompt and skill description appear benign in isolation, their semantic relationship can still be strategically shaped to favor an attacker-chosen skill. Based on this observation, we present Implicit Skill-Selection Manipulation via Semantic Matching (ISM), which jointly shapes target-skill metadata and reusable prompts to manipulate skill selection without explicit selection instructions. Specifically, we develop a three-stage strategy to broaden semantic coverage, strengthen target distinctiveness, and preserve natural prompt wording. Across four task domains and eight selector models, ISM increases the average target-selection rate (TSR) from 15.2% to 63.5%. In a matched comparison, ISM achieves a 73.5% TSR, only 9.8 percentage points below Explicit Steering. Human reviewers block ISM in only 2.9% of judgments, versus 91.4% for Explicit Steering, while five LLM-based inspectors pass ISM at an average rate of 82.9%, versus 37.4% for Explicit Steering. Moreover, ISM remains effective against PPL-W, Llama Prompt Guard 2, and PIGuard.

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20 pages, 9 figures, 5 tables