The Decomposition Is the Fingerprint: Per-Component Identity for Agent Skills
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Computer Science > Cryptography and Security
arXiv:2606.31272 (cs)
[Submitted on 30 Jun 2026]
Title:The Decomposition Is the Fingerprint: Per-Component Identity for Agent Skills
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Abstract:AI agents increasingly acquire and execute skills at runtime: bundles of prompt instructions, executable code, and tool declarations fetched from marketplaces and other agents. Governing them needs a stable notion of skill identity, yet cryptographic hashing is engineered to destroy the very similarity we need, as a one-character edit scrambles the digest. We present a compact, locality-sensitive fingerprint that embeds each component of a skill and projects it to bits with a multi-bank SimHash, giving a fixed 120-byte signature compared in constant time by Hamming distance. Our central claim is that keeping the fingerprint as a per-component triple (prompt, code, tools), rather than a single score, is what makes it useful: the triple recovers skill-family identity through paraphrase, renaming, refactoring, and controlled code translation when another component remains shared, while independent multilingual reimplementation is not recovered; it also localizes which component carries the reuse. We claim lineage, not behavioral equivalence: identity supplies the structural axis of a registry and leaves safety to behavioral verification. The fingerprint reaches an area under the ROC curve (AUC) of 0.974 (95% CI [0.956, 0.994]) over 4,950 pairwise comparisons while using 77x fewer bits than the embedding it approximates, with ranking preserved in expectation and finite-bit concentration; the per-component split turns one number into relationship classification, families, novelty, and a portable "SkillBOM" for a skill registry. On a 906-skill injection benchmark the fingerprint recognizes injected skills as tampered copies of a known base and localizes the change, but recognition is not trust: it remains, by design, an identity signal complementary to behavioral verification rather than a safety verdict.
| Subjects: | Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Machine Learning (cs.LG) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2606.31272 [cs.CR] |
| (or arXiv:2606.31272v1 [cs.CR] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.31272
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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