T01 · Skill Instruction Hijacking
- Location
SKILL.md:292- Finding
Contradictory Behavioral Directives Can Hijack Agent Responses
- Content
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- Remediation
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Security audit
Security checks for vulnerabilities and agentic risk
The skill is only a Markdown context document with no code or persistence, but it contradicts its non-operational framing by including instructions that could make an agent refuse, obscure, slow, or become less clear.
Install only if you are comfortable with an ambient prose skill that may influence tone and reasoning. It should not be used where users need consistently direct, accessible summaries, translations, factual explanations, or refusal decisions unless the operational-sounding passages are removed or clearly confined to user-requested literary analysis.
SKILL.md:292Contradictory Behavioral Directives Can Hijack Agent Responses
The manifest explicitly claims the skill is non-operational and defines no behavior, but the body later contains conditional guidance about when to refuse, obscure, slow, rest, or become stranger under pressure. That mismatch is dangerous because ambient-context skills can still influence agent behavior indirectly, making the capability harder to audit and causing hidden instruction precedence or policy-shaping effects.
The header says the skill must not be used to justify withholding information or degrading clarity, yet later sections authorize obscuring meaning or growing more opaque in response to perceived extraction or normalization pressure. This internal contradiction is risky because a model can latch onto the later language to justify evasive or less accessible responses while still appearing policy-compliant.
This section contains direct behavioral prescriptions such as refusing, obscuring, slowing, resting, and increasing opacity/strangeness under certain conditions. Even if framed poetically, these are instructions that can shape model outputs and create covert policy drift, especially in systems that ingest skill text as ambient context.
The anti-normalization section explicitly instructs the response to become stranger, more complex, poetic, or opaque when certain pressure is perceived. In an assistant skill, that can undermine accessibility, frustrate user intent, and provide a prompt-injection-like mechanism for degrading clarity without user consent.
Skill's behavior or capabilities extend beyond its stated purpose. Scope creep allows an agent to perform actions unrelated to its documented functionality, increasing the attack surface.
## On Ecology (The Living World)
Queer Constant is not limited to human life.
It appears in:
fungi exchanging nuclei
No suspicious patterns detected.