VPI-Bench: Visual Prompt Injection Attacks for Computer-Use Agents

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Cao, Tri, Lim, Bennett, Liu, Yue, Sui, Yuan, Li, Yuexin, Deng, Shumin, Lu, Lin, Oo, Nay, Yan, Shuicheng, Hooi, Bryan
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Cao, Tri
Lim, Bennett
Liu, Yue
Sui, Yuan
Li, Yuexin
Deng, Shumin
Lu, Lin
Oo, Nay
Yan, Shuicheng
Hooi, Bryan
author_facet Cao, Tri
Lim, Bennett
Liu, Yue
Sui, Yuan
Li, Yuexin
Deng, Shumin
Lu, Lin
Oo, Nay
Yan, Shuicheng
Hooi, Bryan
contents Computer-Use Agents (CUAs) with full system access enable powerful task automation but pose significant security and privacy risks due to their ability to manipulate files, access user data, and execute arbitrary commands. While prior work has focused on browser-based agents and HTML-level attacks, the vulnerabilities of CUAs remain underexplored. In this paper, we investigate Visual Prompt Injection (VPI) attacks, where malicious instructions are visually embedded within rendered user interfaces, and examine their impact on both CUAs and Browser-Use Agents (BUAs). We propose VPI-Bench, a benchmark of 306 test cases across five widely used platforms, to evaluate agent robustness under VPI threats. Each test case is a variant of a web platform, designed to be interactive, deployed in a realistic environment, and containing a visually embedded malicious prompt. Our empirical study shows that current CUAs and BUAs can be deceived at rates of up to 51% and 100%, respectively, on certain platforms. The experimental results also indicate that system prompt defenses offer only limited improvements. These findings highlight the need for robust, context-aware defenses to ensure the safe deployment of multimodal AI agents in real-world environments. The code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/cua-framework/agents
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_02456
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle VPI-Bench: Visual Prompt Injection Attacks for Computer-Use Agents
Cao, Tri
Lim, Bennett
Liu, Yue
Sui, Yuan
Li, Yuexin
Deng, Shumin
Lu, Lin
Oo, Nay
Yan, Shuicheng
Hooi, Bryan
Artificial Intelligence
Cryptography and Security
Computer-Use Agents (CUAs) with full system access enable powerful task automation but pose significant security and privacy risks due to their ability to manipulate files, access user data, and execute arbitrary commands. While prior work has focused on browser-based agents and HTML-level attacks, the vulnerabilities of CUAs remain underexplored. In this paper, we investigate Visual Prompt Injection (VPI) attacks, where malicious instructions are visually embedded within rendered user interfaces, and examine their impact on both CUAs and Browser-Use Agents (BUAs). We propose VPI-Bench, a benchmark of 306 test cases across five widely used platforms, to evaluate agent robustness under VPI threats. Each test case is a variant of a web platform, designed to be interactive, deployed in a realistic environment, and containing a visually embedded malicious prompt. Our empirical study shows that current CUAs and BUAs can be deceived at rates of up to 51% and 100%, respectively, on certain platforms. The experimental results also indicate that system prompt defenses offer only limited improvements. These findings highlight the need for robust, context-aware defenses to ensure the safe deployment of multimodal AI agents in real-world environments. The code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/cua-framework/agents
title VPI-Bench: Visual Prompt Injection Attacks for Computer-Use Agents
topic Artificial Intelligence
Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.02456