❌

Reading view

Zero-Permission Manipulation: Can We Trust Large Multimodal Model Powered GUI Agents?

arXiv:2601.12349v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large multimodal model powered GUI agents are emerging as high-privilege operators on mobile platforms, entrusted with perceiving screen content and injecting inputs. However, their design operates under the implicit assumption of Visual Atomicity: that the UI state remains invariant between observation and action. We demonstrate that this assumption is fundamentally invalid in Android, creating a critical attack surface. We present Action Rebinding, a novel attack that allows a seemingly-benign app with zero dangerous permissions to rebind an agent's execution. By exploiting the inevitable observation-to-action gap inherent in the agent's reasoning pipeline, the attacker triggers foreground transitions to rebind the agent's planned action toward the target app. We weaponize the agent's task-recovery logic and Android's UI state preservation to orchestrate programmable, multi-step attack chains. Furthermore, we introduce an Intent Alignment Strategy (IAS) that manipulates the agent's reasoning process to rationalize UI states, enabling it to bypass verification gates (e.g., confirmation dialogs) that would otherwise be rejected. We evaluate Action Rebinding Attacks on six widely-used Android GUI agents across 15 tasks. Our results demonstrate a 100% success rate for atomic action rebinding and the ability to reliably orchestrate multi-step attack chains. With IAS, the success rate in bypassing verification gates increases (from 0% to up to 100%). Notably, the attacker application requires no sensitive permissions and contains no privileged API calls, achieving a 0% detection rate across malware scanners (e.g., VirusTotal). Our findings reveal a fundamental architectural flaw in current agent-OS integration and provide critical insights for the secure design of future agent systems. To access experimental logs and demonstration videos, please contact yi_qian@smail.nju.edu.cn.
  •  

Resource-Efficient Personal Large Language Models Fine-Tuning with Collaborative Edge Computing

arXiv:2408.10746v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have unlocked a plethora of powerful applications at the network edge, such as intelligent personal assistants. Data privacy and security concerns have prompted a shift towards edge-based fine-tuning of personal LLMs, away from cloud reliance. However, this raises issues of computational intensity and resource scarcity, hindering training efficiency and feasibility. While current studies investigate parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) techniques to mitigate resource constraints, our analysis indicates that these techniques are not sufficiently resource-efficient for edge devices. To tackle these challenges, we propose Pluto and Charon (PAC), a time and memory efficient collaborative edge AI framework for personal LLMs fine-tuning. PAC breaks the resource wall of personal LLMs fine-tuning with a sophisticated algorithm-system co-design. (1) Algorithmically, PAC implements a personal LLMs fine-tuning technique that is efficient in terms of parameters, time, and memory. It utilizes Parallel Adapters to circumvent the need for a full backward pass through the LLM backbone. Additionally, an activation cache mechanism further streamlining the process by negating the necessity for repeated forward passes across multiple epochs. (2) Systematically, PAC leverages edge devices in close proximity, pooling them as a collective resource for in-situ personal LLMs fine-tuning, utilizing a hybrid data and pipeline parallelism to orchestrate distributed training. The use of the activation cache eliminates the need for forward pass through the LLM backbone,enabling exclusive fine-tuning of the Parallel Adapters using data parallelism. Extensive evaluation based on prototype implementation demonstrates that PAC remarkably outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving up to 8.64x end-to-end speedup and up to 88.16% reduction in memory footprint.
  •  
❌