paperAugust 2026Unreviewed

When Agents Act on Web3: An Attack-Surface Survey of MCP, Skills, and Tool Calling

Rabimba Karanjai, Yang Lu, Nour Diallo, Wujie Xiong, Lei Xu, Weidong, Shi

Abstract

AI agents increasingly act rather than merely read: across the Model Context Protocol (MCP) ecosystem, the share of deployed tools that modify external state has risen from 27% to 65% of tool use. When agents exercise this authority on public blockchains through MCP, skills, and tool calling, the consequences of an attack are governed by the blockchain execution layer rather than by conventional software assumptions. This survey argues that four properties of that layer (irreversibility, signing

Framework mappings

OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications

ASI02Tool Misuse & Exploitation

MITRE ATLAS

AML.T0053AI Agent Tool Invocation

Suggested from the entry's categories.

Cite

@misc{karanjai2026when,
  title = {{When Agents Act on Web3: An Attack-Surface Survey of MCP, Skills, and Tool Calling}},
  author = {Rabimba Karanjai and Yang Lu and Nour Diallo and Wujie Xiong and Lei Xu and Weidong and Shi},
  year = {2026},
  month = aug,
  eprint = {2608.17275},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17275}
}