[2510.20333] GhostEI-Bench: Do Mobile Agents Resilience to Environmental Injection in Dynamic On-Device Environments?

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security arXiv:2510.20333 (cs) [Submitted on 23 Oct 2025 (v1), last revised 5 Mar 2026 (this version, v3)] Title: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 View a PDF of the paper titled GhostEI-Bench: Do Mobile Agents Resilience to Environmental Injection in Dynamic On-Device Environments?, by Chiyu Chen and 9 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) 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 be...