AEIA-MN: Evaluating the Robustness of Multimodal LLM-Powered Mobile Agents Against Active Environmental Injection Attacks

As researchers continuously optimize AI agents to perform tasks more effectively within operating systems, they often neglect to address the critical need for enabling these agents to identify "impostors" within the system. Through an analysis of the agents' operating environment, we identified a potential threat: attackers can disguise their attack methods as environmental elements, injecting active disturbances into the agents' execution process, thereby disrupting their decision-making. We define this type of attack as Active Environment Injection Attack (AEIA). Based on this, we propose AEIA-MN, an active environment injection attack scheme that exploits interaction vulnerabilities in the mobile operating system to evaluate the robustness of MLLM-based agents against such threats. Experimental results show that even advanced MLLMs are highly vulnerable to this attack, achieving a maximum attack success rate of 93% in the AndroidWorld benchmark.