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GhostEI-Bench: Do Mobile Agents Resilience to Environmental Injection in Dynamic On-Device Environments?

Authors: Chiyu Chen, Xinhao Song, Yunkai Chai, Yang Yao, Haodong Zhao, Lijun Li, Jie Li, Yan Teng, Gongshen Liu, Yingchun Wang

Published: 2025-10-23

arXiv ID: 2510.20333v1

Added to Library: 2025-11-14 23:08 UTC

📄 Abstract

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents to navigate mobile graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Operating in dynamic on-device ecosystems, which include notifications, pop-ups, and inter-app interactions, exposes them to a unique and underexplored threat vector: environmental injection. Unlike prompt-based attacks that manipulate textual instructions, environmental injection corrupts an agent's visual perception by inserting adversarial UI elements (for example, deceptive overlays or spoofed notifications) directly into the GUI. This bypasses textual safeguards and can derail execution, causing privacy leakage, financial loss, or irreversible device compromise. To systematically evaluate this threat, we introduce GhostEI-Bench, the first benchmark for assessing mobile agents under environmental injection attacks within dynamic, executable environments. Moving beyond static image-based assessments, GhostEI-Bench injects adversarial events into realistic application workflows inside fully operational Android emulators and evaluates performance across critical risk scenarios. We further propose a judge-LLM protocol that conducts fine-grained failure analysis by reviewing the agent's action trajectory alongside the corresponding screenshot sequence, pinpointing failure in perception, recognition, or reasoning. Comprehensive experiments on state-of-the-art agents reveal pronounced vulnerability to deceptive environmental cues: current models systematically fail to perceive and reason about manipulated UIs. GhostEI-Bench provides a framework for quantifying and mitigating this emerging threat, paving the way toward more robust and secure embodied agents.

🔍 Key Points

  • Introduction of Soft Instruction Control (SIC), an iterative prompt sanitization loop to defend against prompt injection attacks in tool-augmented LLM agents.
  • SIC modularly processes untrusted input by rewriting, masking, or removing instructions, ensuring only safe commands reach the agent.
  • Empirical evaluations reveal that SIC achieves a 0% attack success rate (ASR) under a range of adversarial attacks, substantially reducing the risk of compromised agent behavior.
  • SIC maintains high utility on benign tasks while critically engaging with security-utility trade-offs; examples show careful balancing of benign instructions and attack prevention.

💡 Why This Paper Matters

The presented SIC method marks a significant advancement in the defense strategies against prompt injection attacks for Large Language Models integrated within autonomous systems. It provides a practical and effective solution that allows agents to operate securely while interacting with untrusted data, highlighting that security against adversarial inputs can be enhanced significantly without drastic compromises on performance.

🎯 Why It's Interesting for AI Security Researchers

This paper is crucial for AI security researchers as it addresses the emerging vulnerabilities faced by large language models in agentic systems, particularly the risks posed by prompt injection attacks. The systematic approach for mitigating these risks, along with empirical evaluations and comparative analyses against existing defenses, provides valuable insights for current and future research in AI security. It raises awareness about the necessity of robust defenses in deployed AI systems, especially as they become more autonomous and integrated into various applications.

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