Haowen Hu
2025
Hidden Ghost Hand: Unveiling Backdoor Vulnerabilities in MLLM-Powered Mobile GUI Agents
Pengzhou Cheng
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Haowen Hu
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Zheng Wu
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Zongru Wu
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Tianjie Ju
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Daizong Ding
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Zhuosheng Zhang
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Gongshen Liu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Graphical user interface (GUI) agents powered by multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown greater promise for human-interaction. However, due to the high fine-tuning cost, users often rely on open-source GUI agents or APIs offered by AI providers, which introduces a critical but underexplored supply chain threat: backdoor attacks. In this work, we first unveil that MLLM-powered GUI agents naturally expose multiple interaction-level triggers, such as historical steps, environment states, and task progress. Based on this observation, we introduce AgentGhost, an effective and stealthy framework for red-teaming backdoor attacks. Specifically, we first construct composite triggers by combining goal and interaction levels, allowing GUI agents to unintentionally activate backdoors while ensuring task utility. Then, we formulate backdoor injection as a Min-Max optimization problem that uses supervised contrastive learning to maximize the feature difference across sample classes at the representation space, improving flexibility of the backdoor. Meanwhile, it adopts supervised fine-tuning to minimize the discrepancy between backdoor and clean behavior, enhancing effectiveness and utility. Extensive results show that AgentGhost is effective and generic, with attack accuracy that reaches 99.7% on three attack objectives, and shows stealthiness with only 1% utility degradation. Furthermore, we tailor a defense method against AgentGhost that reduces the attack accuracy to 22.1%.
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- Pengzhou Cheng 1
- Daizong Ding 1
- Tianjie Ju 1
- Gongshen Liu 1
- Zheng Wu 1
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