"Allow" to Achieve, Over-Privileged Inadvertently: The Unintended Cost of Task-Completion-Driven Pop-up Decisions in Mobile GUI Agents

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 5 Aug 2026] "Allow" to Achieve, Over-Privileged Inadvertently: The Unintended Cost of Task-Completion-Driven Pop-up Decisions in Mobile GUI Agents Dongsheng Chen, Yuxuan Li, Guanhua Chen, Jiaxin Zhang, Xiangyu Zhao, Lei Ma, Xin Yao, Xuetao Wei Mobile GUI agents routinely encounter system permission dialogs during task execution, yet their ability to grant only permissions that are necessary for the delegated task remains largely unexamined. We present a systematic study of this capability, which we term Permission Literacy. We construct a four-level permission framework based on task relevance and privacy risk and validate the evaluated scenarios with three independent experts in GUI-agent safety. We inject Android-style permission popups into real GUI tasks and evaluate four frontier multimodal large language models using synchronized annotated screenshots and UI-tree hierarchies, making the requester, permission, justification, and available actions accessible to the agent. Beyond the main study, we conduct controlled interventions that separately vary task context and agent-visible requester identity. Under the same Calendar task, changing only the requester from Calendar to PiMusic reduces grants from 26/32 to 0/32, revealing a strong but task-conditioned App-Trust Bias. Holding a popup fixed while changing task context also substantially changes authorization decisions, revealing a systematic Task-Prior Override. Prompt interventions can reduce unnecessary grants, but their effectiveness is inconsistent across models and may come at the cost of suppressing legitimate grants. These results suggest that separating task execution from permission authorization is a promising design direction for future work. Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) Cite as: arXiv:2608.04755 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2608.04755v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.04755 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Dongsheng Chen [view email] [v1] Wed, 5 Aug 2026 12:23:16 UTC (148 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-08 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)